Duhozanye: A Rwandan Village of Widows dir. by Karoline Frogner (review)

“Duhozanye” means “We who comfort each other” in Kinyarwandan. Karoline Frogner’s 2011 film profiles Duhozanye, an association of elderly Rwandan widows from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds who had been married to Tutsi men before the 1994 genocide. Their husbands were all killed and all the women who were interviewed had lost children as well. Their losses are unimaginable. Yet the women give their testimonies with the determination of people who believe that telling the history will be a deterrent to having it repeated.

The main character and founder of Duhodzanye is a woman named Daphrose Mukarutamu who lost her husband and eight of her eleven children to the Interahamwe genocidaires. Four of her children were handed over to the Interahamwe by priests who had been entrusted with their protection. Another woman, faced with witnessing the massacre of her Tutsi husband and children, gave her children a poison to drink and swallowed some of it herself. Three of the children died from the poison, her husband was killed for being Tutsi, her eldest daughter avoided taking the poison and survived the tragic suicide pact, and like Toni Morrison’s main character in the novel Beloved, the mother lived to be haunted by the horrible tale. Another woman lost her family to the Interahamwe and then, figuratively, lost herself. She was raped by at least one hundred men, and like 75 percent of rape victims during the genocide, became infected with HIV. “They used me like a thing,” she said. “I looked like an animal. I was full of lice. Even the Interahamwe were disgusted by me. They didn’t call me Juliana anymore, they called me whore. After a while I answered to the name ‘bitch.’” At a particularly inspired moment of inhumanity the Interahamwe threw her face down into an open grave of skinned dead bodies to make her “taste her own flesh and blood.” Abandoned by her friends and relatives for having married a Tutsi man, she was left to descend into madness until the widow’s society came across her: “I got clothes from the widows, they put clothes on my body.” Duhozanye, the society and the film, is full of stories like these, which yet only scratch the surface of what happened to the women of Rwanda.

The film follows Daphrose, the leader of the widow’s society, and Madeline, the organization’s accountant. It records their work with Duhozanye, which includes peer counseling, visits to housebound women like Juliana, and the running of a beer and mineral water co-op called Save, a micro-financing co-op, and a women’s rights seminar for younger women. The film also records Daphrose and Madeline’s experiences with the gacaca court system. In the cases of both women, the convicted murderers of their relatives were appealing their sentences, forcing Daphrose and Madeline to go back to court. The court scenes are particularly fascinating and disturbing for the ways they depict the remorselessness of the defendants. To hear one pink-suited prisoner after another tell it, there is no one in Rwanda today who was part of the Interahamwe. Everyone was forced by someone else to commit the atrocities.

The first two-thirds of the film give one a sense of claustrophobia. We feel as if we are following a handful of surviving Tutsi widows and Hutu widows of Tutsi men who are surrounded by a sea of former genocidaires and genocide-deniers. Even the clergy can’t be trusted. At one point, either the filmmaker or her translator quips off camera, while watching a group of young men unload the Save water truck, that she can’t help wondering if these young men took part in the genocide. Every face, particularly every male face, looks like the face of a murderer. This aside hints at the doubts, fears, and resentments seething beneath what Bert Ingelaere calls the “rehearsed consensus” of postgenocide Rwanda (“Do We Understand...