FILM DESCRIPTION:
In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus were incited to wipe out the country’s Tutsi minority. From the crowded capital to the smallest village, local ‘patrols’ massacred lifelong friends and family members, most often with machetes and improvised weapons. Announced in 2001, and ending this year, the government put in place the Gacaca Tribunals—open-air hearings with citizen-judges meant to try their neighbors and rebuild the nation. As part of this experiment in reconciliation, confessed genocide killers are sent home from prison, while traumatized survivors are asked to forgive them and resume living side-by-side. Filming for close to a decade in a tiny hamlet, award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion has charted the impact of Gacaca on survivors and perpetrators alike. Through their fear and anger, accusations and defenses, blurry truths, inconsolable sadness, and hope for life renewed, she captures the emotional journey to coexistence. There, over time, Aghion charted the emotional impact of a system of local open-air courts that adjudicates genocide crimes, and returns killers to their homes in exchange for confessions. My Neighbor, My Killer is the culmination of ten years of documenting Gacaca justice in Rwanda. 
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FILMMAKER BIO:
As a filmmaker, Anne Aghion has been drawn to places as far-ranging as rural Rwanda, the ice fields of Antarctica and the slums of Managua. She has been praised by critics, both as a director of unique and poetic vision, and a documentarian who conveys a strong sense of the people and places she covers. Her work has also earned her, among other honors, a UNESCO Fellini Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Emmy, and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in Filmmaking. For most of her life, Aghion has been a dual resident of New York and Paris. She spent the first eight years of her career in both editorial and administrative capacities at The New York TimesParis bureau, and at the International Herald Tribune. Moving into film, she worked in a variety of capacities including videographer, production and post-production manager with filmmakers such as Richard Leacock & Valérie Lalonde, and Judith Abitbol, and for documentaries aired on major cable networks such as Canal+ and ARTE. Aghion was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and has received repeat grants from the Soros Documentary Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, and the United States Institute of Peace. She also received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Compton Foundation, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. In addition, Aghion was able to generate funding for her Gacaca Film Trilogy from the Austrian Development Agency, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Development Cooperation, and Oxfam Novib. Aghion holds a Bachelor of Arts Magna Cum Laude in Arab Language and Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, and following her studies, spent two years living in Cairo.
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