24493: Arthur (pub) Raoul Peck interview (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

Back to hell

When Raoul Peck decided to make a film about the Rwandan genocide, he knew
there was only one place he could do it. He tells all to Geoffrey Macnab

Tuesday March 15, 2005
The Guardian

The monster, says Raoul Peck, doesn't come from nowhere. It is slowly
conjured into being, and just about everybody is complicit in its creation. "You look
aside the first time when someone is slapped in public. You don't say
anything. The next day, they kill him in front of you and you don't say anything.
Then, on the third day, they can come and take your wife and rape your wife. And
then it's too late for you to do anything. That is how the monster arrives. It
starts with little things."
The director - and former Haitian minister of culture - is explaining why he
wanted to revisit the Rwandan genocide in his new film, Sometimes in April.
It's one of three major new movies inspired by the horrific events of April
1994, when an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were massacred by their countrymen as the
world stood idly by. Peck is philosophical about the rival projects - the
Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda and Michael Caton-Jones's yet-to-be-released
Shooting Dogs - all coming along at once. From his point of view, the more that can
be done to jolt memories about the genocide, the better. Besides, he says, his
film is likely to reach a far greater initial audience than the other two
features. It was financed by US cable channel HBO and will shown on TV later this
year. "Thirty-five million people are going to see this film. I think its
impact will be huge."

None the less, Peck realised that a dry, factual account of the genocide
would struggle to find an audience. "Drama enables people to get into a subject
emotionally in a quicker and deeper way," he says. So his film focuses on the
experiences of a single family. The story begins in April 2004 as Augustin
(Idris Elba), a schoolteacher, prepares to visit his estranged brother, Honoré, a
one-time radio journalist now on trial for his part in inciting genocide with
his inflammatory broadcasts. Augustin, we discover, was a moderate Hutu, but
his wife was a Tutsi. They were split apart in tragic circumstances during the
genocide.

What Peck's film does supremely well is to show how, during the genocide,
violence became normalised. Elderly men say goodbye to their wives, pick up their
machetes and march out to murder their former neighbours as if they're simply
off on a day's work. Teenagers sit swigging beer at roadblocks, ready to kill
anyone who doesn't have the right papers. Soldiers roam from house to house,
blithely shooting dead any Tutsis they encounter. In sci-fi films like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Dawn of the Dead, it's a cliche to have sleepy
communities suddenly turn on their own inhabitants. In Rwanda, this happened for
real.

"I tried to be as authentic as possible in making my films, even if it is
under the label of fiction," Peck says. Lines of dialogue, he points out, are
taken directly from witnesses' testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal.
The film was shot on location in Rwanda, in the places where massacres took
place. Every incident, however melodramatic or far-fetched, has its corollary in
actual events. Wounded Tutsis really did hide out in the muddy marshes. The
girls at the church school Sainte Marie, some Hutu, some Tutsis, really did
make a stand against the militia, choosing to die together rather than be split
apart. In today's Rwanda, the relatives of victims really do live side by side
with the killers from a decade ago. "It's just the reality. What can you do?
Are you going to kill your neighbour now because he killed your family?" Peck
asks. "People are tired. People want some rest ... you can't be living with
eternal anger in you. Life must go on."

Now 51, Peck was born in Port-au-Prince in Haiti, but spent many years in the
Republic of Congo, where his parents fled to escape the Duvalier dictatorship
in the early 1960s. Though he was an outsider, he says the Rwandans welcomed
him. His previous film, Lumumba (a fictionalised account of the final year of
the life of the assassinated prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo), had been well received in the country and the local people trusted his
motives. "I had a moral contract with them," he says of his relationship with
the Rwandans. "They knew that I wouldn't catch a story, run with it and never
come back."

Peck begins Sometimes in April with eerie archive footage shot by Belgian
colonialists. A white potentate in full uniform is shown meeting a cowed and
suspicious tribal leader. The dignitary offers his hand but the leader is too
baffled and terrified to take it. "This is one of the strange films that the
Belgians made about the first colonialists who came to Rwanda," Peck says. "It was
like one of those old Nazi propaganda pieces on the Jewish people, with the
depiction of the local people set against the majesty of the conquerors."

He included this overture to show his audience in a shorthand way that the
fissures in Rwandan society first opened up during the colonial era. It was the
Belgians who installed the rigid system of racial classification that
distinguished between the Tutsis and the Hutus. Peck also made frequent use of western
TV footage shot during the genocide. (As he makes clear, the western media in
the spring of 1994 was far more preoccupied with the suicide of Nirvana's
Kurt Cobain.)

The film-maker becomes visibly irritated when I ask if Debra Winger's
character in the film, the US lawyer Prudence Bushnell agitating for UN and US
intervention to stop the massacre, was included at the behest of HBO, so there would
be at least one sympathetic westerner with whom US audiences could identify.
"No, no, no, no, not at all," he protests. "I think the American public and
studios would have been happy if I had excluded that part, so it would just have
been a black story in Africa. For me to be able to show the inaction of the
American administration makes it only worse." Nor is he apologetic about
shooting in English. "We had to switch to English for financial reasons, but what is
more important than the language is the authenticity."

Back in January, Peck held the world premiere of Sometimes in April in a huge
stadium in the Rwandan capital of Kigali in front of an audience of thousands
of people, many of whom had lost relatives during the massacre. "I could only
imagine making this film if the Rwandans were the first to see it. Whatever
the critics say doesn't matter to me. The only people whose judgment I would
accept are the Rwandan people."

· Sometimes in April screens at the Ritzy Cinema, London SW2 (0870 7550 062),
on Thursday as part of the Human Rights Watch film festival. Details:
hrw.org/iff/2005/london/