Over the course of 100 days, 1 million people lost their lives as a result of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Ten thousand people a day were murdered.
“This would be the entire population of SMU murdered in just over a day,” Kenyan filmmaker Patrick Mureithi said as he put a global human rights issue into context for the audience.
Mureithi screened his film “ICYIZERE: hope” Wednesday night as the conclusion of SMU’s Communication Excellence Week.
The documentary focused on the African Great Lakes Initiative and its Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) program.
HROC is a three-day workshop in which 10 survivors and 10 perpetrators of the genocide come together to work through their grief, remorse and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I made the film not to point the finger, but to show that reconciliation, working through pain, was possible,” Mureithi said.
The film closely followed four participants—three survivors and one peretrator—in a 2008 workshop, taking the audience through the Rwandans’ journey to be at peace with themselves and with others.
Mureithi was inspired to create the film back in 2004 after seeing a PBS documentary on the genocide that shook his worldview.
“Before that documentary I believed that people were inherently good. The documentary challenged that belief,” Mureithi said. “It was happening so close to me and I had no idea. Imagine that happening in Missouri or Kansas and you didn’t know.”
The filmmaker’s passion to communicate the story of the Rwandans inspired Communications Studies and Public Affairs professor Dr. Ben Voth to show the film at SMU.
“I want my students to ask, ‘what is my role as a communicator?’ They can say something, they can express something, communicate something to a greater and more positive effect,” Voth said.
“I feel empowered and inspired to use my voice to broadcast these atrocities,” sophomore Roza Essaw said after viewing the film and listening to Mureithi.
The film screening and Mureithi’s speech were a part of the Communication studies program’s “Better Communication for Better Leaders for Human Rights” theme week.
“Violence doesn’t happen because there are guns or because of the weather. It happens because someone puts that idea in your head,” Voth said. “These are really problems of communication.”
