Image and Memory

Abstract

Eric Kabera is a Rwandan documentary and fiction filmmaker and producer. He collaborated on one of the first fictionalised films about the genocide, 100 Days (dir. Nick Hughes), and has participated in a variety of projects related to the process of memorialisation and commemoration of the events of 1994 and their aftermath. Kabera is also the founder of the Rwanda Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival, which aim to bring the moving image to the country's rural populations. This interview focuses on Kabera's documentary film The Keepers of Memory: Survivors' Accounts of the Rwandan Genocide (2005), which traces the individual trajectories of those affected by the genocide and gives them a platform to voice their experience. Special attention is paid to the relationship with physical surrounding, to image and to the internal and external experience of trauma and memory in their collective and individual forms. The theoretical assertions about memory recording are juxtaposed with pragmatic issues encountered by a filmmaker as practitioner. The interview was conducted on 30 March 2008 in Kigali, Rwanda.