Save Knut

Karl-Marx-Allee, former Stalinallee, East Berlin

When I was back in Berlin for a well deserved holiday in February I heard the first time about Knut, the little polar bear born in the Berlin Zoo. Now back in Kigali, I listened to the Deutsche Welle Radio reporting on some animals right fanatics who suggested he would better be put to sleep than being raised by humans. I say: Save Knut!

Knut

Of course, the two weeks were far too short and busy for real holidays. However, I was there with the stars and it wasn't as cold as I feared it would be after all.
But Berlin and Ouagadougou aren't the only places with film festivals. Add Rwanda to the cinematic map and welcome to Hillywood! On Friday the 3rd Rwandan Film Festival was ceremoniously opened with a 80min long advertisement documentary on Rwanda ("Rwanda Rising"). We all agreed afterwards that it was definitly needed to correct the country's image abroad as for many people genocide is still the first and sometimes only thing that comes to their mind. If that attempt should be left to an ex-mayor of Adlända, Georgia (no offence, Jiyeon!!) though, remains debatable. The festival also features a couple of German movies, courtesy of the German Embassy, but it seemed I was the only one enjoying the "schnoddrigen Berliner Humor" of "Alles auf Zucker" in the crowd. We were sitting outside the major entrance of Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) when people started to murmur. My friend Laura said it must be that Rwanda scored against Marocco (the game was on simultaneously) ...unlikely as it seemed...and indeed, it turned out that they only expressed their dissatisfaction with the movie. I have to say, though, that I could see where they were coming from.
Skimming further through the program it became obvious fairly quickly that it was a little unbalanced and depressive in its choice of films as the majority was dealing with issues of genocide, violence and trauma. Maybe you wouldn't really expect anything else from Rwandan film makers only 12 years after genocide, it took 10 years in Germany to make fun of GDR and socialism (sorry if that seems a little far fetched), but why also showing a whole lot of foreign films with the same issues? Why not allowing for a tiny bit of happiness and easy going even if it was only for the length of a film? We were watching more films tonight, "Darfur Diaries" and another documentary on Holocaust survivors, and it was watching the misery of the refugees and accounts of enormous horrors when I thought, maybe it's just good to know that you are not the only one suffering the unimaginable? This was kind of confirmed later when we saw the motto of this years festival: "sharing stories". Although, as there were only a handful of Rwandans around us I wondered how many people this message was going to reach?