Healing After War

10 TUESDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2018 THE wild sidE PHoToS By SANDESh KADUR HEALING AFTER WAR BY NANDiNi DiAS VElhO oël Karekezi’s The Mercy of the Jungle (2018) – which played at IFFI 2018 on 23rd November - explores how two Congolese soldiers survive, and reflect upon their lives when lost in the dense jungles of Central Africa. Unfortunately, the official invitation to attend the festival came too late for him to attend his own screening, but nonetheless the young Rwandan director was happy to fly down from Kigali to Goa to visit India for the first time. There is an Indian connection to the beginning of Karekezi’s cinema career. In 2009, he graduated from Mira Nair’s Uganda-based Maisha Film Lab, which is a non-profit training initiative for emerging East African filmmakers, encompassing courses in film production, screenwriting, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, sound recording, and acting. His first feature film imbabazi (2013) was about whether forgiveness was ever possible in the aftermath of violence in wartime. Karekezi told The Peacock “it is a deeply personal question. I was myself only eight years old when my father was murdered in the genocide.” (Note: in the span of four months in 1994, an estimated one million Rwandans were killed by armed mobs of Hutus, including around 70% of the Tutsi population). Apart from Nair, Karekezi’s other main inspirations are the Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin J Red line (1998, but he says he has his own unique voice. After graduation, the Rwandan produced his first feature, that was funded by money collected in small amounts from his friends and peers. imbabazi (2013) was well-received by international festivals, and its success ensured The Mercy of the Jungle could be made in collaboration with production houses from overseas. This new film has already won the most promising audiovisual project at the Durban Film Mart in South Africa, and when it was screened in Rwanda its director says it was warmly received by his own people, who were proud and happy he had directed it. Karekezi says the situation in Rwanda has dramatically improved over the last decade, and its people have started to reconcile their differences. To learn more about the current scenario, The Peacock contacted Sandesh Kadur, the award-winning wildlife filmmaker, whose most recent work includes BBC’s Planet Earth II. He most recently visited Rwanda in 2016, to collect footage in the Volcanoes National Park, famously home to most of the country’s population of endangered mountain gorillas.” He says it’s safe to visit these days, and also told us that watching a gorilla in the wild for the first time was an incredibly surreal experience, “nothing prepares you for the feeling of connection and oneness as you sit watching them.” However, like many other large and charismatic species, gorillas have suffered immense collateral damage in the ethnic conflicts that have remained endemic in their habitats for decades, besides being continually hunted for meat and for illegal wildlife trade. Dr. Joshua Daskin’s doctoral thesis from Princeton University investigated how war across 19 African countries affected 30 large mammal species. He found the more frequent the conflict, the more severe the declines of animal populations. But although wildlife populations dwindle in conflict zones, the animals rarely went extinct, suggesting that working towards conservation during conflict, and immediately after a cease-fireare interesting opportunities for restoration. Daskin told The Peacock, “Akagera National Park in Rwanda suffered very heavy wildlife declines and deforestation during the Rwandan genocide, but the efforts thereafter demonstrate an important example of post-war recovery and restoration.” So we know that wildlife recovers, but the lingering question remains: can people heal and recover after a war? Has Karekezi managed to forgive the killers of his father, even though no one has apologized to him, and he is entirely unaware of their identity? The young Rwandan thought for a bit, then told us we all need to understand and accept our differences to live together in peace. “Forgiveness is necessary for the better future of our children” Nandini Dias Velho is an awardwinning wildlife biologist.