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After the genocide of 1994, the Rwandan government temporarily suspended history from the school curriculum. The characters in After Years of Walking - children, teachers, genocide killers, students and historians - all find themselves in an uncertain zone between the old history and a new one.
The filmmaker found a historical film made in 1959 by Belgian missionaries. She took this film back to Rwanda in 2002 as an entry point into Rwanda's search for history.
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The Boulevard d’Ypres in Brussels, with its large and colourful Mediterranean stores, offers glimpses of the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights. Urban development is now driving out these shops selling couscous, dates and olives. It is this turning point in the history of her ownstreet that Vanagt uses as a starting point for a “microhistorical experiment”.
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Three statues on the Mont des Arts in Brussels: a king, a queen and a medieval knight.
Three newcomers to Brussels: a Philippino boy, a Rwandan refugee girl and a Moroccan boy.
Three statues, three children; an imaginary conversation.
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April in Rwanda; the month of mourning in the new Rwandan calendar.
While the country is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the genocide, children play games. Filmmaker Sarah Vanagt spent the easter holiday in a “children’s republic”, governed by genocide orphans and refugee children growing up in the war-torn border zone between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Large parts of Goma were covered with lava after the eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano in January 2002. Today kids live in the ruins on the lava. They sell paper hankies to grown-ups in the city, and lava rocks to construction builders. Meanwhile, the kids are building their own city on top of the old one, a city complete with radios and tv’s, white jeeps and blue helmets, presidents and vice-presidents, commercials and hate campaigns, cemeteries and election fever.
The kids emerge from the lava, as it were, and reveal the world underneath the rubble.
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SILENT ELECTIONS is a single-screen version of the installation POWER CUT.
The power goes off and the screen goes black: one of those innumerable moments of darkness when the buried memories from decades of conflict suddenly resurface. In the streets of Goma, children play at being news correspondents: Congo is preparing for its first democratic elections since 1960. Using a variety of sources, Sarah Vanagt collects elements from personal stories in a region torn apart by hatred and violence. Images and sound recordings taken by the children of Goma, TV news-clips and young soldiers’ accounts serve as her visual and audio material. Silent Elections is a documentary film on the memory and imagination of young Congolese on the eve of potential political change in their country.
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