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Karoline Frogner, director. Duhozanye: A Rwandan Village of Widows. 2011. 52 minutes. Kinyarwandan and Norwegian, with English subtitles. Rwanda. Women Make Movies. $295.00.
"Duhozanye" means "We who comfort each other" in Kinyarwandan. Karoline Frogner's 2011 film profiles Duhozanye, an association of elderly Rwandan widows from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds who had been married to Tutsi men before the 1994 genocide. Their husbands were all killed and all the women who were interviewed had lost children as well. Their losses are unimaginable. Yet the women give their testimonies with the determination of people who believe that telling the history will be a deterrent to having it repeated.
The main character and founder of Duhodzanye is a woman named Daphrose Mukarutamu who lost her husband and eight of her eleven children to the Interahamwe genocidaires. Four of her children were handed over to the Interahamwe by priests who had been entrusted with their protection. Another woman, faced with witnessing the massacre of her Tutsi husband and children, gave her children a poison to drink and swallowed some of it herself. Three of the children died from the poison, her husband was killed for being Tutsi, her eldest daughter avoided taking the poison and survived the tragic suicide pact, and like Toni Morrison's main character in the novel Beloved, the mother lived to be haunted by the horrible tale. Another woman lost her family to the Interahamwe and then, figuratively, lost herself. She was raped by at least one hundred men, and like 75...