dir. PIOTR CIEPLAK
year. 2017
country. UK & Rwanda
rating. 18
£6.00 (£4.50)
Doors 19.00 - Film 19.30
A documentary about how Rwandans use personal and family photographs to remember and commemorate the loved ones they lost in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi claimed almost a million lives in just 100 days. The world stood by as men, women and children were being hacked to death by machetes. When the international community finally decided it was time to pay attention, it did so through memorable photographs of mutilated bodies and seas of nameless refugees. But many Rwandans remember their loved ones through images of life, not death: a passport or I.D. card photo, an unguarded snap taken in the garden or a group portrait from a wedding or a baptism. The surviving images are precious objects, with so many destroyed and lost forever. A lot of people have only a solitary image of their loved ones. Many have none at all.
The Faces We Lost engages with nine Rwandans (survivors, relatives of victims and professional memory-makers), who guide us through their stories and share their experiences, remembrance and images. It is the first documentary to explore the many functions of these priceless photographs, and one of the few films to engage with Rwandans as users of images, rather than simply their subjects.
These deeply personal stories are all marked by the terrible experience the genocide and its legacy have left on their owners. Each is unique to the person who tells it. But The Faces We Lost also explores the professional aspect of memory-making in Rwanda: The Genocide Archive (which holds thousands of original images donated by the victims’ relatives) and the Kigali Genocide Memorial (where many of the photographs are on public display). As the private and the public meet and as each person recounts their relationship with the photographs they have or they wish they had, The Faces We Lost moves to paint a complex memorial landscape of contemporary Rwanda.
The film will be followed by a Q&A with director Piotr Cieplak.
An award-winning director and writer, Piotr has worked on projects in Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Argentina, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. He is the director of Memory Places (UK, 2009) and Memory Cards (UK, 2015) – screened at Rwanda Film Festival, Africa-in-Motion (Edinburgh), Montecatini International Short Film Festival (Italy) and Afrykamera (Warsaw). Memory Cards won the Best Polish Lens Award at Afrykamera 2016.
The Faces We Lost (2017) is Piotr’s first feature film. It has screened widely on the international film festival circuit. In 2018, it received the runner up award (moving image category) from the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and was nominated in the film of the year category by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.
Piotr has been working in Rwanda for a decade and is the author of: Death, Image, Memory: the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath in photography and documentary film (Palgrave, 2017). Piotr has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently a lecturer in filmmaking at the University of Sussex, U.K. He has written extensively about Rwanda, Africa, film and photography and served as a festival jury member.