Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's been 10 years since the Rwandan genocide; a hundred days of ruthless slaughter that left perhaps a million dead. Mostly the outside world sat that one out. But in commemoration of the anniversary, this month a flood of memorials, specials, documentaries and feature films are filling the ether. Now, it seems, the West is ready to remember. But two years ago, we interviewed Nick Hughes, a photo-journalist who was among the first to try and convey the experience in a way that people might comprehend. Hughes had already made many documentaries of the horror, but this time he and his co-producer, Eric Kabera, who lost 32 family members to the genocide, wanted to find a new way to tell the story, so they hired witnesses -- Tutsis and Hutus -- as actors - and created a love story to put a human face on the slaughter. The result was One Hundred Days. [CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: Get rid of women and their baby rats. Don't leave any rats for the future. [CROWD CHEERS] The time for work is now. [CHEERS] What we have waited for is happening! [CHEERS Hutu power, power! Hutu power! [DRUMS AND MUSIC]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Director Nick Hughes joins us now from Rwanda. Welcome to the show.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're a documentary cameraman who's covered the war in Rwanda. You have hours and hours of powerful footage of the genocide. Why did you decide to tell the story of such a dramatic historical event as a fictional drama?
NICK HUGHES: I, I worked on so many documentaries after the genocide, and in many ways a documentary is the best way to tell the history of such an enormous event, but documentaries about Rwanda aren't watched, and if they are watched, they're watched by people who already know and have assumptions about Rwanda, and therefore you're preaching to the converted, and A Hundred Days is made to explain in a dramatic form, to explain what happened to - in Rwanda - to an audience that has no interest in Rwanda.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Two of the most important characters in A Hundred Days are Josette and Baptiste, both young lovers. Was this lovers subplot a way of drawing people in?
NICK HUGHES: You know, love is a universal theme. The audience, even if they're in Tokyo or Toronto can immediately relate to the hopes and fears of that couple.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I'd like to share with you my reaction to the movie. It seemed to me that when you cleaved closest to the actual events, it had the most impact, and when you moved off to the plots that you had imposed to attract the audience, because the actors were, frankly, rather wooden, it was when my mind began to wander.
NICK HUGHES: Indeed. I mean none of the actors are professional actors. But they are Rwandan, and they were portraying something under whose shadow they lived and from which they had lived. Maybe the film fails on this, and maybe we should have had very professional actors, but they weren't going to be Rwandan. Some people find the acting wooden; some people find that because they're Rwandan acting their own story, twice as powerful.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:I was fascinated by your use of the extraneous characters who came through the, the UN soldiers, the journalists. You have journalists -- people holding cameras -- just as you, yourself, did during the actual genocide -- scattered all through. [SOUNDTRACK FROM A HUNDRED DAYS]
MAN: Yes, hold on, hold on -- [SHOUTING] Catherine! Just wait right there. [RUNNING]
WOMAN: Who were they?
MAN: They were friends! Mr. Kabera was not liked! He was in an opposition political party.
WOMAN: Is that why they killed him?
MAN: I, I don't know - maybe, maybe. I, I don't know. Maybe.
WOMAN: Who killed him?
MAN: I, I can't tell! I don't know!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They're generally in the way; they're irrelevant; they're taking no moral stand, and they have no impact on what's going on around them -- it's as if they were dropped from the moon.
NICK HUGHES: Yeah, well I think that's exactly what happens - you had UN soldiers from the West; you had aid workers; you had ex-pats; you had journalists -- all of them betrayed the Rwandan people. The media took absolutely no part in the genocide and in exposing it to the international community. It brushed it off with cliches, caricatures. The aid workers, 99 percent of them, just got on the plane and left. The ex-pats just left their servants to be slaughtered and evacuate--while they evacuated their dogs. And the UN who were there, brought in to protect the Tutsi population -- to keep the peace -- just ran away. And there's a worrying thing, I think, at the moment that the -- particularly in the media--in film, in documentaries, in books -- is that there is now a sort of myth-making about Westerners in Rwanda -- that somehow they suffered. They didn't suffer at all. I didn't lose anybody there. You know --compared to someone who lost their entire family - generations slaughtered in a, in a month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's clear that you don't have much respect for those characters who wander through your story. You don't pay much attention to them at all, and yet you, yourself -- when you were there -- videotaped a machete-wielding man beating a woman and her daughter pleading for their lives -- and it was broadcast all over the world in 1994. Do you think it did nothing?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it was something very, very small. I mean I didn't save anybody. I didn't put my camera down and save any children. And nor did anybody else. And, and nor did those people who, who sat at home and watched those two women being murdered -- watching their television in, in Europe or America -- nothing happened. There was no great outcry for something to be done.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:In an effort to tell your story in a way that would be popular and not cheapen or distort it, you tried to cleave a sort of middle course. You put in a love story, but you offered no redemption for any of the characters. There isn't anybody who is saved. There isn't anybody who isn't irreparably damaged. Here's a clip of a little girl talking to a UN soldier in, in front of one of the mass graves.
UN SOLDIER: Did you see what happened?
GIRL: They put all the Tutsis in the ground and in the pit latrines.
UN SOLDIER: Did you know them?
GIRL: My friend Anton is there with his whole family.
UN SOLDIER: If he was your friend, don't you miss him?
GIRL: No! He belongs in a pit latrine. It's natural. He was a Tutsi.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Given that the story ends on a note of absolute despair, is there any technique, including a love story, that you think would be able to keep the audience there?
NICK HUGHES: There is nothing positive about genocide. You can't come out with some glimmer of hope. Genocide is all negative. It is all dark and evil, and the suffering that people go through is beyond imagination. But, if there's some understanding and some sympathy and, and there's some belief that Rwandans are human beings amongst an international audience, then that's -- that's a great step.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, now that you made the film that you wanted to make, do you think you can find a way to forgive yourself a little bit?
NICK HUGHES: Well, I-- it's not really a matter of forgive--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I guess what I mean is--
NICK HUGHES: Yeah?
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- it's obvious that you came away with an enormous burden, and a sense of responsibility that you don't feel you've fulfilled, and that the rest of the Western community in Rwanda certainly didn't fulfill, and you made this film. So my question is, is can you leave it alone now?
NICK HUGHES: Well, it-- the film gives me an opportunity to speak about Rwanda, but I don't get the opportunity to go back and stop by the side of the road and pick up a child who's going to be murdered by the MRND and take him out of the country to safety -- and, nor does anybody else get that opportunity to do that again. And nobody said anything about stopping it happening next time. So no, I don't think there is anything really to feel positive about or redeemed about. Not at all. The genocide is the opposite of redemption. There is no redemption. You can't go back. Those people are dead, and it will happen again.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
NICK HUGHES: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Photojournalist and documentarian Nick Hughes. His film, One Hundred Days, premiered in 2002. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Up next, waxing poetic about cars, and unmasking the wag.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS]