“Ben’Imana is one of the most arresting, viscerally alive and profoundly humane African debuts to have appeared at this festival in a generation.”

There are moments at Cannes when the relentless machinery of the festival — the glamour, the hustle, the performative certainties of the Croisette — is suddenly, violently interrupted by something that feels like the real world breaking through. Ben’Imana, the debut feature from Rwandan writer-director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, just screened in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and it hit this festival like a fist to the chest. Here, finally, is a film that earns every second of the attention it demands — a work of such uncompromising engagement that it renders most of what surrounds it on this year’s programme decorative by comparison.

The setting is Rwanda, 2012 — a nation outwardly rebuilding, inwardly still haemorrhaging. Community tribunals have been established across the country in an attempt to stitch together a society ripped apart not by distant enemies but by its own hands: neighbours who turned on neighbours, siblings who denounced siblings, spouses who betrayed spouses. It is into this landscape of enforced proximity and unresolved fury that Vénéranda moves — a woman of poise and purpose who has dedicated herself to facilitating dialogue between those who lost everything and those whose families took it from them. She is adored, admired, and entirely alone with the truth of who she is. Her public self is pure mise en scène — a performance of strength so sustained it has become indistinguishable from the woman herself.

That truth is monstrous in its intimacy. Assaulted during the genocide, Vénéranda has never known which man fathered her daughter Tina — a knowledge she has barricaded behind decades of professional devotion and carefully maintained composure. The elegant social worker who guides others toward confession is herself the most guarded keeper of secrets in the room. When Tina’s pregnancy forces that secret into the open, the film becomes something almost unbearable to watch — a woman stripped of the story she has told herself about herself, confronting in her own flesh the very fractures she has spent a lifetime asking others to bridge. The dénouement is not a plot resolution so much as an existential unravelling.

Tina herself is drawn with rare precision: restless, warm, fiercely intelligent, and carrying without knowing it the accumulated weight of everything her mother could not say. The revelation of her origins does not break her so much as reorient her entirely — and the scenes between mother and daughter in the film’s latter half are among the most quietly devastating exchanges you will see on any screen this year. Two women negotiating the distance between them across a void neither of them made — a dialogue de sourds conducted, heartbreakingly, in perfect lucidity.

The women who surround them are equally extraordinary. Suzanne — ravaged by illness yet burning with an almost feral energy — has arrived at a place beyond forgiveness, beyond strategy: she wants justice, and she wants it named as such, not dressed up in the consoling language of national healing. Her clashes with Vénéranda crackle with the specific bitterness of people who once shared the same grief and have since become strangers to each other’s conclusions. Victoire moves through the film like a wound that has learned to walk — shrouded, averted, unable to absorb a loss made monstrous by the identity of those who inflicted it. Her own blood murdered her family. There is no language adequate to that, and Dusabejambo wisely does not search for one. And Madeleine — formidable, cornered, braced against the judgement of an entire community — carries within her the location of the dead, buried in the earth beneath her own home. Her eventual testimony is the film’s punctum, the moment around which everything else orbits and shatters.

And then there is Grand-mère — a figure of such delicate, devastating poetry that she alone would justify the film’s existence. Locked in a private 1973, immaculately dressed, her bag packed for a departure that will never come, she waits for a man who disappeared into the violence half a century ago and promised to return. She has withdrawn from language, from reaction, from time itself almost. She is what happens when history takes everything and leaves the body behind — the purest embodiment of durée as trauma, of time experienced not as progression but as permanent, unresolvable arrest.

Dusabejambo’s decision to build much of her cast from women rooted in the actual communities where the film was shot is not merely a production choice — it is a philosophical one, and it reverberates through every scene. These performances do not read as performances at all. They read as lives. The extended preparatory work the director undertook with her cast before shooting has produced something alchemical: a permeability between the women and their characters that makes the conventional vocabulary of acting feel entirely beside the point. What we are watching, in the fullest sense, is a form of collective testimony — cinéma vérité not as aesthetic posture but as ethical necessity.

The visual intelligence at work in Ben’Imana is extraordinary — a fully realised cinematic language in which the placement of the camera is never neutral, never merely compositional, but always an ethical declaration. Those who inhabit their pain openly, who have chosen confrontation over concealment, are met by a lens that presses close — almost uncomfortably so — bathing their faces in light that is at once yielding and pitiless, as though illumination itself were a form of demand. Those who carry concealed truths, whose relationship to what they know is one of avoidance and shame, are approached from behind, from the side, their faces half-consumed by shadow, their silhouettes edged in cold light — present and withheld simultaneously. The framing itself becomes a moral instrument, the frame a verdict. Most devastating of all are the moments when one woman speaks the unspeakable and the camera swings not to her but to those who must receive it — capturing in bodies, in breath, in the involuntary physics of listening, the exact cost of hearing what cannot be unheard.

The editing matches this ambition move for move — restless and precise in equal measure, threading between the communal sessions and the characters’ interior lives with a fluidity that feels less constructed than organic, as though the film were assembling itself according to the same associative logic by which memory operates. Nothing announces itself. Everything accumulates. The montage does not illustrate the story — it enacts it, performing on the viewer the same layering of wound upon wound that the narrative describes. By the time the film reaches its final act, the weight of what has been accumulated is almost physically oppressive, in the best possible sense.

Visually, the film is ravishing in ways that feel genuinely hard-won rather than decorative. Dusabejambo treats the Rwandan landscape not as scenery but as a living participant — the hills, the light, the particular quality of an afternoon sky over a country still digesting its own catastrophe. There is a flamboyance to some of the imagery — a beauté cruelle — that coexists, thrillingly, with the raw documentary texture of the performance scenes: a tension between splendour and devastation that the film never resolves because it understands, correctly, that Rwanda itself has never resolved it.

The sonic architecture of the film deserves its own standing ovation. Rather than reaching for the emotional safety net of a conventional score, Dusabejambo constructs a soundscape from the inside out — rooted in the oral and musical traditions of Rwanda, threaded through with the mesmerising resonance of the Inanga string instrument and the spectral breath of the umwirongi flute, punctuated by the ambient textures of lived daily life: a voice through a radio, an announcement echoing through a shopping arcade. The son direct — that hallmark of the most rigorous documentary tradition — here achieves something beyond mere authenticity: it becomes the film’s nervous system, transmitting sensation directly from screen to body. Eruptions of raw, uncontained sound detonate against stretches of near-total quiet, each transition carrying its own emotional freight. The result is a film that you do not merely watch but inhabit — one that continues to reverberate long after you have left the theatre and stepped back into the bright, indifferent light of the Croisette.

The questions Ben’Imana raises are ones that no festival jury, no critical consensus, no tidy verdict can settle: whether healing is conceivable without the erasure of what was done, whether living alongside those who destroyed you constitutes survival or its opposite, what obligations the catastrophe of one generation places upon the bodies of the next. Dusabejambo does not flinch from any of them, and she does not pretend to answer them. She holds them open with a steadiness and a compassion that feel, in the current state of world cinema, almost revolutionary — a filmmaker whose regard for her subjects is itself a form of political act.

Let it be said without qualification: Ben’Imana is one of the most arresting, viscerally alive and profoundly humane African debuts to have appeared at this festival in a generation. That the selection committee placed it in Un Certain Regard rather than the main competition will, I suspect, come to be seen as one of those curatorial decisions that history quietly reverses — for this is precisely the kind of film that belongs at the very summit of the Palme d’Or race. One thinks of Mati Diop’s Atlantics, which in 2019 under Alejandro González Iñárritu’s presidency walked away with the Grand Prix — proof, if any were needed, that African women filmmakers can not only compete at the highest level of this festival but triumph there. Dusabejambo deserves to stand in that same light. The world has just been introduced to a major filmmaker. Pay attention.

(c) Image copyright: Mostafa El Kashef