INNOCENT by Amelia Umuhire (ENG-FRA Subtitles)

Length: 51’32’’

2020

Amelia Umuhire tells the story of Innocent Seminega – her father – as a young student, teacher, husband and parent up until his death at the hands of the Hutu extremists in Rwanda. Tracing her family history as she addresses him, she weaves together threads from his love of linguistics, his romance with her mother, parenthood, and life lived amidst violent conflict – until unfurling her own story of her childhood and movement between countries – critiquing the white gaze which might try and frame her family’s story.

Innocent is an intimate portrait that resists the narrative canon that the West imposes on recent Rwandan history.

Co-produced by Radio Papesse and Pratiques d'Hospitalité (ESAD Grenoble) in the frame of the Hospitalité artistique et activisme visuel pour une Europe diasporique et post-occidentale research unit.

Amelia Umuhire is a Rwandese filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning web series Polyglot, which won Best German Webseries at the Webfest Berlin in 2015, the award-winning short experimental film Mugabo and the Prix Europa nominated sound piece Vaterland (Fatherland). Her work has been screened at the MOCA LA, MCA Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum, 10th Berlin Biennale, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and many more. She is one of the 2020 laureate of the Villa Romana Prize in Florence and completing her first feature film.

More at

www.luciafestival.org

www.radiopapesse.org