-Rwanda
By UWERA RUTAMU Fabiola
IMFURA is a 2017 short film written and directed by a Rwandan filmmaker, Samuel Ishimwe Karemangingo.
The 36 minutes film, in Kinyarwanda language, with English subtitles opens up with an old man narrating a story through a song filled up with a lot of emotions, accompanied by the “inanga,” a Trough-zither shaped Rwandan traditional instrument.
“My mother left me when I was still a baby on breast milk, she never saw any celebration and she will never see one”. The old man sings on…
The song fading out is cut off by another song – a baby lullaby being sang by a mother joyously playing with her baby in a boat trip as a young man: Gisa -the main character enviously looks at them. With the use of the internal point of view of the main character, these two consecutive scenes give us a glimpse into Gisa’s past and what his journey is about: reviving the memories of her late mother and connecting to his roots.
Once at his mother’s village, Gisa is welcomed by the villagers in traditional songs and dances. The old man shown reciting “Amahamba,” pastoral poetry for the cow, suggests that Gisa was even offered a cow. Gisa is called “Imfura” by an elder.
In Kinyarwanda, Imfura can mean “first born’ or “honest”, “noble”, “upright”. Any upright member of the community is referred to as “Imfura”. Since Gisa was not an active member of this village community, one wonders if the filmmaker intended to illustrate how one can be Imfura by association, he provokes debate as to whether being Imfura is by merit or it is hereditary.
The filmmaker explores different cultural norms present in the way Rwandans communicate and relate to each other, and by him experimenting with several shooting angles, he captures the characters’ facial expressions and behaviors in an interesting way that reveals how silence is also an integrative part of the communication process in the Rwandan community.
Through the silence and short conversations, the filmmaker well depicts how hard it is to talk about the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi; as those who witnessed and survived those atrocities haven’t yet found the right words to explain what happened to the post-genocide generation.
Carrying this burden of the past on their back, the post-genocide generation is still trying to patch up the stories of their loved ones in their memory with every little detail they get to be told. After more than 20 years Gisa gets to learn about his mother’s educational background, religious belief, and legacy. Through a land dispute between his mother’s siblings, he also gets to learn about a house her mother left. Attempts to resolve this land dispute unveil the issue of preserving the memory of the Genocide and its victims, one side wanting to preserve the physical elements with its scars intact and the other side wanting to renovate them, sell the inherited property, move forward, and rebuild a new life. A choice both sides base on the assumption of what the deceased would do if she was still alive.
Throughout the film, the filmmaker continues to use the sound of the objects’ movement, birds, waves of the lake, thunder, and character’s breaths and gestures to break off the characters’ loud silence felt in some scenes.
Holding a background in photography, the filmmaker brought to life the beauty of the village setting, the landscape, and the lively personality of the villagers. His choice of showing a billboard placed at the beach in front of the village houses appeared intentional, the viewer is left wondering if it illustrates the progress of the village development, or calls out the village gentrification.
This film also questions other life issues inherited from colonialism, giving an example of coffee farmers not knowing the smell or the taste of the coffee they sell. Is it ignorance or conditioning?
The women in hijabs, the image posters of the Pope and Jesus’ hang on room’s walls, the fishermen’ songs and the gospel calling for repentance spread around, as well as using Easter holiday as a time reference, vividly represent the dominance of religion in our society. However, the filmmaker does not explicitly explore more about this religious aspect in relation to the main character’s identity searching and healing journey.
The poetic script is not the only satisfying element in this film, the characters’ delivery is also phenomenal. Considering that most of the actors are non-trained locals, the film director found in the village, he did an amazing job with assigning them roles, everyone naturally fits in his/her character.
All the characters shown singing or playing traditional instruments seems to have a level of a mastery that could only be acquired after years and years. Through poetry and the lyrics of the songs, the viewer is subconsciously taken in an introspective personal healing journey.
This film has been embraced globally, and it even won the Silver Bear Jury Silver Price at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival in the short film category.
