AfricAvenir presents Grey Matter

AfricAvenir this weekend presents the Namibian première of award winning Rwandan film ‘Grey Matter’ (Matiere Grise). The French-language film is screened with English subtitles.
The film Grey Matter reflects on the suffering of those who as children survived the Rwandan genocide. It denounces the mechanisms in which hatred and intolerance are created by the media and eventually dehumanize human beings.
Grey Matter offers a rare narrative insight into the “burden of surviving” for multiple sectors of the Rwandan population. Written and directed by Kivu Ruhorahoza, the film is set in the brisk, luminous serenity of middle-class Kigali and tells the story of Balthazar (played by Herve Kimenyi) a wry intense young Rwandan film-maker with a bookshelf full of Western classics and a head full of Western movies. He prepares to make his feature film, come what may and muses about it into the lens of his video camera. Using this set-up Ruhorahoza offers a searing political view of the minor metropolis ‘s cultural modernity and modest prosperity, in stark contrast to the horrific atrocities that are committed every day in close proximity.
He shifts from Balthazar to clips of the film that Balthazar is making, which to the displeasure of the authorities turns out to be a devastating revelation on recent massacres and their enduring psychic traumas. The auctor suggests that such terrifying depictions of a society that is sick with violence are incompatible with forward-looking bureaucratic oblivion.
The film has been screened internationally and was even the winner of the Griot Award (Best Director) and the SIGNIS Award for Best Feature Length Narrative Film at the 9th Festival Cine de Africa in Cordoba, Spain last year.
Screening of the film will take place this Saturday at the Goethe Centre Auditorium at 19 00. Entrance is N$30.