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In the summer of 2006, Lee Isaac Chung went to Rwanda as a volunteer with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), the Christian ministry that his wife Valerie worked for. Chung and Valerie, who had a background in art therapy, decided that their best gift to Rwanda's youth would be to help them use art to work through the traumas and horrors they'd been through in the 1994 genocide. Chung, who studied film at the University of Utah, wanted to teach filmmaking and allow the kids to tell their own stories, "to let the culture speak for itself." The result of that summer filmmaking class was a feature film, Munyurangabo.

But Munyurangabo has since become much more than a class project. The film played at many of the world's top festivals in 2007 and 2008, including Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, London, and New York. It won the grand jury prize at the AFI Festival in 2008, and has been thoroughly praised by critics. Variety's Robert Koehler described it as an "astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut … the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda."

The film, now available to Film Movement subscribers (and to the rest of the public on October 6), follows two boys—Munyurangabo (Ngabo) and Sangwa—from two separate tribes as they embark together on a journey through the backroads of Rwanda. Munyurangabo wants justice for his parents who were killed in the genocide, and Sangwa wants to visit the home he deserted years ago. Though they plan to visit Sangwa's home for just a few hours, the boys stay for several days. Their friendship is tested when Sangwa's wary parents disapprove of Munyurangabo, warning that "Hutus and Tutsis are supposed to be enemies."

Chung recently spoke to CT Movies about his faith, the process of making Munyurangabo, and how it fits in to the genre of African films.

Director Lee Isaac Chung

When you went to Rwanda with YWAM, did you already have the idea for the film?

Lee Isaac Chung: Yes. When I got the idea that I was going to teach filmmaking, the idea to actually make a film seemed like a logical one. I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a class project, but was as professional as possible, where all the students are involved in a very professional way. It seemed like a good way to both honor Rwanda and honor the students.

How did the story come about?

Chung: The general idea, which I developed with my friend Sam Anderson, was that the film should be about the revenge that someone from the Tutsi people group wanted to enact upon the person who killed his father in the genocide. We both thought that a number of things should shape this character's journey and that they had to be firmly rooted in Rwandan culture. So we introduced a lot of cultural elements like dance, music, spoken word. But we also wanted to root the story in everyday experience, so we decided that the main character should have a friend who's from a different tribe, and he goes and sees how this friend's family lives on a day to day basis, experiencing the natural countryside. That was the general idea, but the specific things that these characters encounter, and the things they say, all came about as we made the film in Rwanda. I used a technique that some Iranian filmmakers use when they film in rural areas with different dialects, which is simply to let the people have their own words and to give them a lot of space to improvise. Our idea was that we wanted to hear from the people themselves.

Where do you think this film fits with other modern films about Africa, like Hotel Rwanda and Beyond the Gates?

Chung: A lot of these films were a little discomforting to me because they were all geared toward a Western market. Usually there are no actual Africans in these films. They're either African-Americans or Westerners, and we enter the story through them. I don't think this does a lot of justice to what has happened. I noticed that even though we'd seen a barrage of these films, none of us really knew who Africans were. I talked to some people in Rwanda who had acted as extras in some of these Western films, and most of them had played people holding machetes in the background or something, or dead bodies. On a symbolic level, this is the wrong message we're sending to Africa.

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