‘I am the one who killed the parents of this girl.’ That is Emmanuel, a character in the film Kinyarwanda, in a scene toward the end of the movie. The girl in question is Jeanne, the daughter of Emmanuel’s former employer. Shot on location a decade and a half after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Kinyarwanda was the directorial debut of African American film-maker Alrick Brown. Released in 2011, the film won a clutch of awards, including the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and the World Cinema Audience Award at the 25th American Film Institute Fest. Weaving together several stories, reportedly based on true accounts of survivors, the filmmaker seeks to tell the story of this horrific and historically momentous event.

One of the stories the film portrays is that of the characters Emmanuel (played by Edouard Bamporiki) and Jeanne (Hadidja Zaninka). The film fleetingly suggests to the audience that Emmanuel has feelings for Jeanne, who is in a relationship with another young Hutu man. In one scene the film shows Emmanuel watching Jeanne arriving at her home with her parents, his face changing from a lustful, toothy expression to seriousness on realising that Jeanne’s boyfriend is with them. In another scene, in the chapter of the film called ‘Guns and Cockroaches’, Emmanuel is shown hanging out with two other young men with machetes. One of the young men asks Emmanuel if he has a girlfriend. Emmanuel lies. He says he had one, but got rid of her because she was half-cockroach (meaning part-Tutsi and part-Hutu). He is referring to Jeanne. With Jeanne having been brought into his mind, Emmanuel says perhaps they should go and pay her a visit one last time, so that he can give her one last kiss. One of his companions asks if Emmanuel would really kiss a cockroach, and adds that one does not kiss a cockroach but rapes it/her, a sentiment with which Emmanuel agrees. Can we interpret these scenes to indicate that a feeling that appears to be opposed to another feeling is already kneaded together with it; that an act of hatred is sewn to a hunger for love, if not lustful desire?

I am not offering a detailed reading of Kinyarwanda.