Petit pays (2020)

Directed by: Eric Barbier | minutes | drama | Actors: Jean-Paul Rouve, Isabelle Kabano, Djibril Vancoppenolle, Dayla De Medina, Tao Monladja, Veronika Varga, John Biniyer, Benny Bumako, Brian Gakwavu, Michel Goffin, Kenny Hubbawive, Nelson Membe, Ruben Ruhanamilindi

He is somewhat reminiscent of Stromae, the idiosyncratic Belgian musician with Rwandan roots who also gained a firm foothold in the Netherlands with songs such as ‘Formidable’ and ‘Papaoutai’. Gaël Faye has a Rwandan mother and a French father and has been working on the Parisian rap and hip-hop scene for years. Like Stromae, he is a multi-talented who, after studying economics, went to work for a few years at an investment fund in London, but soon discovered that he could not express his creativity and changed course. Besides being a musician, Gaël is also a gifted writer, who made his debut in 2016 with ‘Petit Pays’. This is a semi-autobiographical novel about the young Gaby who grew up in Burundi, a small country in central Africa that, like neighboring Rwanda, was torn apart by an ethnic civil war in the mid-1990s. The terrible images of completely butchered Tutsi villages are still raw on everyone’s mind. About three quarters of Rwandan Tutsis – some 800,000 people – were killed in the space of just 100 days. Exhaustion, famine, dehydration and disease killed another 80,000 in refugee camps. Gaël’s book shows how a child’s relatively carefree life is suddenly turned upside down by a horrific genocide.

We know ‘Hotel Rwanda’ (2004) of course, just like ‘Sometimes in April’ and ‘Shooting Dogs’ (both from 2005). And more films have been made about the genocide in Rwanda. The film adaptation of ‘Petit pays’ (2020) is a welcome addition to this list, because we are looking over the shoulder of a child, which makes the events even more pointless. Ten-year-old Gaby (Djibril Vancoppenolle) lives with his French father Michel (Jean Paul Rouve) and Rwandan mother Yvonne (Isabelle Kabano) and younger sister Ana (Dayla De Medina) in a colonial villa in the Burundian capital Bujumbura. His carefree life consists of going to school and playing mischief with his friends. For example, they steal mangoes from the trees to sell them and hang around the wreck of an old Volkswagen bus. The fact that his parents’ marriage is no longer so good does not yet fully dawn on him. But besides a divorce, an even bigger drama threatens over the heads of the Chappaz family. Ethnic tensions are mounting. A Tutsi employee of father Michel is threatened by a colleague and schoolmate Francis (Nelson Membe) challenges Gaby and his friend Gino. Although the boys eventually befriend this Tutsi boy, disaster strikes. Because the extremist Hutu militias are targeting not only Tutsis but also moderate people of their own people. Mother Yvonne, meanwhile, is worried about her family in Rwanda and decides to track them down.

French filmmaker Eric Barbier, known for his ‘La promesse de l’aube’ (2017), shot the film in Rwanda, with Rwandan, Burundian and Congolese actors in supporting roles. Much to the delight of Gaël Faye, who was closely involved in the creation of ‘Petit Pays’ in order to keep it as authentic as possible. What makes this film so gripping is not necessarily the atrocities that the Hutus and Tutsis inflict on each other, but the brutal way in which an entire generation of children is robbed of their innocence in one fell swoop. Children we saw playing mischief just before. Children for whom the divorce from their parents, which is undeniably in the air, is already a bolt from the blue. If they don’t understand much about it, they don’t know what to do with the senselessness of genocide. Neither do most adults. Gaby’s mother (actress Isabelle Kabano also played a role in ‘Sometimes in April’) goes through such traumatic events when visiting relatives in completely torn Rwanda that she never recovers from them. Fears that she projects on her children in a heartbreaking scene, which in turn scares them for life. Barbier stays away from false sentiment, but still manages to play on our emotions by pointing so strongly to the contrast between the time before and the time after April 7, 1994. And it is precisely this contrast that makes this film hopeful: if there was once a time without worries, why couldn’t it return?

‘Petit pays’ is carried with verve by the still young Belgian Djibril Vancoppenolle, who, thanks to his natural charisma, knows how to wrap the viewer around his finger. Dayla de Medina is also convincing as Gaby’s sister Ana, innocence itself. Anyone who has children of their own will feel: how awful it must be to see your child confronted with the dark sides of humanity at such a young age. The great thing about this film is that, despite all that misery, the tone is not all gloomy: people are resilient and old wounds leave scars, but they do heal.