Rooftop Films: Munyurangabo (Event Over)

Sat., August 23, 2008

Munyurangabo
A stunning neo-realist drama about revenge and friendship in post-genocide Rwanda. The debut feature from the 2008 recipient of the Rooftop Films and Eastern Effects Equipment Grant.

Venue: On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
Address: 232 3rd Street at the corner of 3rd Avenue (Gowanus, Brooklyn)
Directions: F, G to Carroll Street or M, R to Union Street and read here for directions from the train| Map
Rain: In the event of rain the show will be held indoors at the same location
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music by Twi the Humble Feather
9:00PM: Films
Tickets: $6 at http://going.com for a limited time
Preview: See short films from this and other programs at www.IFC.com
Presented in partnership with: Eastern Effects, IFC.com, New York magazine, and XØ Projects

PROGRAM NOTES:

Munyrangabo (Lee Isaac Chung | Rwanda & USA | 1:37:00)
“Like a bolt out of the blue, Korean American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung achieves an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut with Munyurangabo, which is—by several light years—the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda.”
— Robert Koehler, Variety

“We hear so often today of the “collapse of Western culture” that it comes to sound like a bit of cocktail party repartee, almost taken for granted, such an obvious fact of life that of course there’s nothing we can do about it, like global warming. Nothing could be more dangerous. Munyurangabo also grows out of cultural collapse on a grand (and horrific) scale, and then proceeds to transcend it.”
— Robin Wood, Film Comment

There is an old axiom in narrative that a weapon seen in the first act will be used in the final act. The drama is what lies in between. Munyurangabo opens with a scene of a young man in a Rwandan market, watching a nearby fistfight, and stealing a machete. But the portent of that act—under violent circumstances and in a nation still reeling from a brutal Genocide in 1994—is immediately destabilized in one of Chung’s astonishing camera moves, which manages to be naturalistic and subtle, but also momentous. From a close-up on the now bloody machete, the camera tilts up to the troubled face of Ngabo, then back down to the machete, clear of blood. The drama posed within Munyurangabo does not follow your typical action/revenge plot—the question posed is not if or how Ngabo will use the machete. The question is should he use it.

Ngabo and his best friend Sangwa set out on a journey. If there is any doubt as to their goal, it’s cleared up early in the film, when Ngabo asks Sangwa, “Do you forget that we’re on a journey to kill a man?” The conversation is covered with direct addresses to the camera, quietly accosting and implicating the viewer, and mirroring a stunning moment later in the film, when the opposite sentiment is expressed in a direct address from Edouard B. Uwayo, Rwanda's actual poet laureate, who recites a stark and lovely poem calling for peace. The poem is aptly titled “Liberation is a Journey.”

Along the way, Sangwa must deal with his own difficult past, returning to his home after three years with no communication. The rich back-story is subtly revealed, perfectly weighing the tension of the scenes, which are played with a minimum of dialogue, few close-ups, and a languorous delivery that belies the complex passions. Long takes and wide angles allow the subtle gestures of body language to grandly enrich the emotions—Sangwa’s mother eagerly feeding her grown son when there is so little food, and dejectedly waiting alone in the doorway as her son leaves the house off-camera; Sangwa’s father aggressively showing his son how to till a field after the boy had abandoned the family for city life; Ngabo contemplatively hacking at a tree stump with the machete; and everyone moving as if exhausted by the myriad burdens of heat, poverty, hunger, illness, and guilt.

As the friends press on, Sangwa and Ngabo’s friendship is tested, torn between their expectations for a brutal fate, and their hope that somewhere in them lies the willpower to discover liberation. By leaving us with core ambiguities in the plot, Chung challenges the audience to ask complex and poignant questions. As an individual, what is the moral thing to do, when given the opportunity for revenge? And given that Western manipulations and indifference have forced Rwanda and much of Africa to prey on itself, what is the proper punishment for a criminal, when the entire nation has become a victim?

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Lee Isaac Chung was awarded Rooftop Films and Eastern Effects 2008 Equipment Grant, lending him a complete two-ton lighting and grip package to shoot his second feature film, Lucky Life. The film will begin production in September. Read more about the grant and Lucky Life here.