Isabelle Kabano

In Rwanda, KUBANA explores, through stories and silences, how a society chooses unity and coexistence, offering a poetic and political look at living together.

Aya, a young Ivorian woman in her early thirties, says no on her wedding day, to everyone’s astonishment. After emigrating to Asia, she works in a tea export shop with Cai, a 45-year-old Chinese man. Aya and Cai fall in love but can their affair survive the turmoil of their past and other people’s prejudices?

Gabriel, aged 10, lives in a comfortable ex-pat neighborhood in Burundi, his ‘small country’. Gabriel is a normal kid, happy, carefree and having adventures with his friends and little sister. Then in 1993, tensions in neighboring Rwanda spill over, threatening his family and his innocence.

Rwanda, 2012. The country is emerging from an era of silence after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, and people's courts are being set up with the aim of bringing justice and reconciliation. Veneranda, a survivor, is convinced of the need for these trials. Despite pressures, she organises discussion sessions between victims and the families of the executioners. Therapy for some, an act of betrayal for others, these testimonial sessions revive and reveal the traumas that each of them try to overcome, in their own way. The wounds of Veneranda's past are exposed again when she learns of her daughter's unexpected pregnancy and the identity of the father. Veneranda has to face her own contradictions and the dark parts of her past.

Lia, a Belgian-Rwandan basketball player facing the twilight of her career. Twenty years after fleeing the genocide, she is asked to join the Rwandan national basketball team. This journey stirs buried memories of a painful past: exile, family silences and the pain of a fractured identity. Through her eyes, the film explores confrontation between memory and the present, and a nation scarred by tragedy with a contemporary Rwanda brimming with life and creativity.