Berlin Fellowship 2023 — Film and Media Arts

Vita

Born and raised in Rwanda, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo is a self-taught filmmaker with a degree in electronics. Her journey as a filmmaker started in 2008 when she won the Tribeca Film Institute script competition and directed her first short film, presented at Tribeca 2011. She worked as a researcher on Steven Spielberg and Alex Gibney’s documentary series “Why We Hate”. She has a soft spot for everyday life, and her work as a storyteller attempts to make sense of the world. It is an expression of love, pain, and dreams as she explores the dualities of life. BENIMANA is her first fiction feature project.

Residency

BENIMANA is a feature film set in the aftermath of the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. It is a story of the friction between collective and individual existence, an attempt to understand the concept of being “other (a stranger)" in your own community, the intergenerational trauma when stereotypes and hypotheses collide, and the cost of people's efforts to coexist again in a post-conflict era. The characters are mainly women who go through successive moments of happiness, chaos, and darkness where love, hate, resentment, and reconciliation are intertwined. They thus portray my country, Rwanda, in its efforts to rebuild itself after 1994. The residency gives me time and space to focus on the screenplay, and to meet and talk with film professionals to find the right approach to directing/production.

Recommended by Volker Schlöndorff.