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This week on TALK! with AUDREY: Multi-award-winning filmmaker ANNE AGHION, joins me to talk about “My Neighbor My Killer,” her internationally acclaimed documentary about learning to speak with your enemies. Aghion, winner of Human Rights Watch Film Festival Nestor Almendros award for courage in filmmaking, spent nearly ten years following the residents of a small rural community in Rwanda as they went through that country’s extraordinary experiment in reconciliation and justice following the 1994 genocide there. The “Gacaca” (ga-CHA-cha) laws established open-air citizen courts in every village and town in the country: in exchange for full public confessions, participants in the genocide are being sent home to live next door to survivors of the families they massacred, while the survivors are being asked to forgive the killers.
“My Neighbor My Killer,” focuses on the intense emotional process of reconciliation, and captures the startling eloquence with which the subjects of the film describe the challenges of forgiveness and co-existence, and the government’s mandate to put aside ethnic divisions.
