The Notebooks of Memory

Plot

Anne Aghion's third film in her Rwanda series concentrates on the local citizen-judges' tribunals, where they must weigh survivor accounts of the genocide massacres against the perpetrators' testimony.

On a lush Rwandan hillside, more than ten years after the 1994 genocide directed at wiping out the Tutsi population, a tiny rural community repeatedly meet on the grass for the Gacaca court trials, a judicial experiment aimed at bringing unity back to the country. Award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion spent four years chronicling the trials, where perpetrators would barter confessions for shorter jail sentences.