RWANDA GACACA
Working as a field producer and cinematographer for National Geographic TV in 2003, I covered the gacaca (meeting in the grass) genocide trials in Rwanda. For nine years over 100,000 men, mostly Hutu, were imprisoned for the murder of over 800,000 ethnic Tutsi, but the government was overwhelmed with how to try them. President Paul Kagame decided to bring the genocidaires to justice by using a pre-colonial form of trial in which they faced the families of their victims in an intense, emotional public confrontation. It was harrowing and yet cathartic to witness the exchange of the stories of brutality with the atonement of the genocidaires. The noble concept of reconciliation met head on with the unresolved trauma of the genocide. The entire nation held its collective breath, but today, with government supervision, perpetrators and victims live side by side.