Damn closed eyes
Grand Prix Angers, Golden Screen Montreal 1996
Life: "A stone in the pond, with infinite shock waves."
Le Monde: "Frédéric Laffont's film is not a documentary on the massacres: we will not see an image of the atrocities committed between April and July 1994, according to a premeditated plan at the state level; nor will we hear the testimonies of the survivors.
Cursed Be Your Eyes Closed describes the isolated, impossible struggle of three individuals determined to gather the facts and testimonies so that history is not rewritten and justice is done. They encounter only obstacles and threats.
Laffont's film is like a trace of the silence that spreads. Reread Primo Levi."
Libération: "It's August 1994. Frédéric Laffont, journalist and director, has just arrived in Kigali to spend a year filming the establishment and then the hearings of this extraordinary court. "I wanted to document the writing of history. In 1945, the Nuremberg trials and its -Never Again- were the foundations of our current world."
As the end credits roll, the camera suddenly returns to Rwanda, to the scene of the massacre, skulls, bones, suitcases scattered about. A shock. In an hour and a half, we already had lost all memory. Cursed Be Your Closed Eyes... is indeed a film about history.
But, preciously, for the first time, he tells the intangible: how we forget."
English version:
CURSED BE CLOSED EYES
Duration: 45'
© Interscoop, BBC, 1996
A film by Frédéric Laffont
Edited by Jean-François Giré
Duration: 54'
© Interscoop, La Sept/Arte, 1995
Rwanda, 1994.
A genocide.
How can we write history and demand justice?
Three individuals seeking justice in Rwanda
By CORINE LESNES
Le Monde, December 3, 1995, at 12:00 a.m.
Director of the Interscoop agency, winner of the Albert Londres Prize, author of numerous highly acclaimed reports, Frédéric Laffont could probably not avoid this unprecedented event in the history of the second half of the twentieth century: a genocide recognized by the UN. He tackled the subject in August 1994 and worked on it for over a year. A year of traveling back and forth between Paris and Kigali.
Plus a few additional trips: The Hague (where the international tribunal is based), New York (for a meeting at the UN's 3341 office), Brussels (where Hutu opponents and those disappointed with the
new Tutsi regime rub shoulders). The result: Rwanda, Maudits soient les yeux fermés (Rwanda, Damn the Closed Eyes), an 80-minute documentary co-produced by La Sept, Arte, and Interscoop; and a book, Maudits soient les yeux fermés,
written in collaboration with Françoise Bouchet-Saulnier and published by J.-C. Lattès-Arte.
The director chose to focus his work on the theme of justice by following three characters, all equally committed to ensuring that history is not diluted by the pragmatism of reconciliation, but who we see gradually throwing in the towel. The first, Joseph Matata, a Hutu human rights activist, was abroad when the genocide began. From Kigali to Brussels, where he ended up taking refuge to write a play about the “Rwandan tragedy” (both past and today), we see him typing on his old typewriter the testimonies of the survivors he interviewed in the hills. He does this work as much for himself as for history, because the director makes no secret of the fact that these testimonies have no legal value for the official authorities.
The second is a Hutu, a former rebel who fought against the Rwandan government.
In his imposed ordeal, Frédéric Laffont was able to choose the tone and music that suit the images of piled-up human remains, without which there seems to be no vision of Rwanda anymore. But his most powerful images show the living, the prisoners, also piled up by the thousands in
their cells. They appear almost as an afterthought in the film, as if the director himself had been a little afraid of them. Yet they are the most striking, the most disturbing, and some Rwandans who
attended the preview screening in Paris were not mistaken. They immediately denounced it as a “political” maneuver, repeating that the fate of the prisoners, alleged perpetrators of the genocide, could not be equated with that of the Tutsis and progressive Hutus in 1994.
Nevertheless. We reported here in January on the overcrowded prisons and the harrowing visit. They had 14,000 inmates. Today, there are 59,000. We wondered how they could all lie down at the same time. Today, they are literally walking all over each other. Frédéric Laffont's camera follows them at ground level, where their feet are tangled together. Among the most common diseases, in addition to dysentery, are now lower limb injuries and necrosis of the toes. Unable to rest regularly, the inmates' legs suffer from edema, which sometimes
requires amputation. Fifteen months after the first arrests, no detainees have been tried. Although the UN and the ICRC have set up new detention centers, no detainees have yet been transferred there. According to Doctors Without Borders, the number of human bites is also increasing in these places, not to mention the concentration camps that prisons have become.