we are all Rwandans

Rwanda has a film festival! It's in its fourth year, in fact!

The festival is here in Kigali and lasts a week, right on the heels of the nation-wide, two-week long "Hillywood" Film Festival, where huge inflatable portable screens are set up out in the villages so that movies can be shown to those who might never have access to film otherwise. Amazing!

This year, the Film Festival is featuring the opening of the Canadian-produced film, "Shake Hands With the Devil," about Dallaire, the UN General who was overseeing UN troops during the genocide. I happened to be here in 2006 when they were filming this movie, right up the road from WR's offices, so I'm looking forward to seeing it (hopefully tonight....Becca and I have plans to go).

My friend Erica invited me along with her to the Film Festival's opening yesterday at the Serena Hotel, where there were five short films being shown. One of the best features there was called, "We Are All Rwandans," and chronicled the story of secondary school students in a boarding school in Kibuye (western Rwanda), three years after the genocide.

There was a social studies teacher at that school who taught the teenagers (of mixed ethnicity) that love is stronger than hatred, and unity would conquer chaos. He taught the students that each of them had a high calling: to value every human being as someone who was created in God's image. He taught them that there was something more important than ethnicity, and that was humanity.

I don't have the opportunity right now to finish the rest of the story! But it's good! More later....