NOW PLAYING: Munyurangabo!!!

Jeffrey O told us to see SERAPHINE, but he insisted we see MUNYURANGABO, his favourite film of the year. And guess what: it's playing the VanCity this coming weekend - as soon as SERAPHINE closes at the Hollywood, in fact. Never rains but it pours.... (Not funny.)

Check out our coverage at Filmwell...

Retrospectives: an essay by Lee Isaac Chung, director of Munyurangabo

A Cinema of Listening and Looking: A Filmwell Conversation with Lee Isaac Chung, Part One

A Cinema of Listening and Looking: A Filmwell Conversation with Lee Isaac Chung, Part Two

M. Leary Review

Thanks for the tip, Mr Chattaway.


MUNYURANGABO
Vancity Theatre Screenings
USA, 2007, 97 min, 35mm
Directed By: Lee Isaac Chung

Friday, Nov 27 at 6:30 pm
Saturday, Nov 28 at 8:30 pm
Sunday, Nov 29 at 4:45 pm
Sunday, Nov 29 at 8:30 pm
Monday, Nov 30 at 6:30 pm

A decade after the genocide that ripped apart Rwanda, how are the children of that country to move forward with their lives? That is the question at the heart of this remarkable debut feature from Lee Isaac Chung, a Korean-American from Arkansas who studied medicine at Yale before he decided to make films.
Ngabo (Jeff Rutagenwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye) leave Kigali and journey to the home Sangwa left three years prior – they agree to tell his parents they are on a journey looking for work. In fact, they have another, more troubling objective in mind. Sangwa's resolve weakens as he is accepted by his family, but they remain suspicious, even hostile towards his friend, a Tutsi whose parents died in the conflict.

Shot in just 11 days while Chung was teaching filmmaking at a relief mission, with three orphans of the genocide playing key roles, Munyurangabo begins as an apparently straightforward immersion in a specific time and place, but develops into more complex and moving inquiry about the chances for reconciliation.

"Intense empathy courses throughout Chung's first feature, but more remarkable is his ability to foster great kinship between viewer and subject, his largely handheld cinematography generating forceful intimacy with his story's two teenage protagonists [...] as well as a tactile sense of environment. Both qualities run deep in this piercing, authentic, and condescension-free tale." - Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

"Like a bolt out of the blue, Lee Isaac Chung achieves an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut [...] by several light years the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda." - Robert Koehler, Variety