The first words spoken in Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo‘s “Ben’Imana,” are of forgiveness. But the body does not forget and the speaker’s defiant stare and tight, unyielding stance suggest she is trying, not wholly successfully, to discipline herself into feeling the words as well as just saying them. Dusejambo’s fraught yet forthright first film, which recently won the Camera d’Or for the best debut in Cannes, lives in the difficult space where what we say roils against what, in our heart of hearts, we really feel, a ferment here agonizingly intensified by the omnipresence — and omni-absences — of the Rwandan genocide. Reflecting on these piercing paradoxes, Dusabejambo’s narrative (co-written with Delphine Agut) cannot but be shaped by them; there are no simple resolutions for a reality defined by ruptures and ragged edges. 

It is 2012 and 18 years have passed since the village of Kibeho, set in the mountainous terrain of southern Rwanda — captured in all its counterpointing mild, placid mistiness by Mostafa El Kashef’s subtle, attentive camerawork — bore witness to some of the nation’s most devastating massacres. On a hilltop, there is assembled a Gacaca, one of the elder-run community courts established as part of Rwanditude, the national reconciliation program designed to break the cycle of insidiously intimate neighbor-on-neighbor violence and enmity that characterized the conflict.

On behalf of her decimated family, Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) been asked to forgive villager Karangwa (Aime Valens Tuyisenge), the man deemed responsible for the slaying of her siblings, as well as countless other relatives and in-laws. But almost as soon as she does so, her sole surviving sister Suzanne (a blazing Isabelle Kabano, the only professional actor in the cast) speaks out in fury. By what authority and on whose behalf does Vénéranda get to extend even nominal grace toward the man who murdered Suzanne’s husband and three-month-old baby?

The sisters’ argument is long-standing and extends into their private homes and into the discussion group that Vénéranda leads in the local church, where the women of Kibeho are invited to share their stories in preparation for their own testimonies before the court. Some of these women, like Suzanne, are the victims of the terror. Some are the relatives of its perpetrators — now mostly themselves dead or imprisoned — like Madeleine (Léocadie Uwabeza), whose sons were among the aggressors and who now seems as powerless to comprehend the actions of her offspring as she is to disavow them, or to adequately atone for their sins. These group scenes are among the film’s most powerful, not only because of the desperate stories of loss and injury they contain, but because they emphasize the tangled histories of everyone in this tiny hamlet, and the physical proximity in which they all now have to co-exist.

Vénéranda runs these sessions with cool-headed compassion, quoting often from the Rwanditude playbook about the nation’s journey toward “healing wounded hearts.” But the group is also a kind of filter, a place where women from all ethnic backgrounds (a laudable aspect of the screenplay is the refusal to overtly classify the participants as Hutu or Tutsi) may exorcize some of their pain and anger before addressing the Gacaca. “We carry wounds which are not of interest to [them],” she says firmly, a sentiment that seems to inflame her sister even further. Suzanne, a longtime AIDS sufferer who is getting more ill by the day, represents the other end of the spectrum: a woman who continues to endure pain and grief so all-encompassing, perhaps she fears she would not recognise herself without it. After everything that has been taken from her, it must feel like Rwanditude — personified by Vénéranda — now wants to take her virago’s fury as well.

Vénéranda’s bright, university-bound teenage daughter Tina (a excellent Kesia Kelly Nishimwe) has inherited at least a little of her aunt’s firebrand spirit but has been able to grow up relatively free of the ethnic prejudice that so blighted the country in the 1990s. And Vénéranda also tends to her aged mother (Arivere Kagoyire) an elderly lady whose loss of memory cannot but seem like something of a blessing, given the horrors she would have to remember in the loss of six of her eight children. And so the three generations of this family become emblematic of a desire to forget the past, contend with the present, and hope for the future.

But then Tina confesses that she is pregnant by her laid-back boyfriend Richard (Elvis Ngabo), and it is revealed just how much Vénéranda herself is struggling, in her own wounded heart, to enact the precepts she so regularly preaches. Richard’s family is on the other side of the ethnic divide, but the pregnancy also causes other sources of internalized shame and resentment to surface, chief among them the glaring absence from the family photo album, of any pictures of Tina’s father. As a school-leaving-age young woman in 2012, simple maths dictates that she must have been conceived around the time of a conflict that was also defined by the use of mass rape as a weapon of war.

Indeed, relative to its size, Kibeho has experienced disproportionate drama and trauma. In the 1980s it was the site of a string of reported apparitions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, some of which took gruesome, bloody form. Retroactively, they were interpreted as premonitions of the 1994 violence that saw many thousands of locals, primarily Tutsis, massacred at the hands of Hutu Génocidaires. And that event had its own bloody echo the following year when several hundred detainees at the large-scale Tutsi-run Kibeho displacement camp were killed in the mass panic that followed the camp’s closure, not to mention the many thousands of camp inmates suspected murdered in reprisal attacks thereafter.

So for Dusabejambo to set her film in this of all places has deep significance for Rwandans of all ethnicities, and while it lightly fictionalizes loosely similar thematic territory to that covered by Joshua Oppenheimer’s superb documentary on the Indonesian genocide “The Look of Silence,” “Ben’Imana” differs in its perspective. Rather than attempting to reckon with Rwanda’s recent history from the outside in, its fevered gaze on this riven and traumatized community comes from the inside out. If this creates a film that can — like Kibeho, like Vénéranda — sometimes feel divided against itself, caught between determined optimism and irreconcilable despair, that simply makes it the more honest: a deeply felt dispatch from the frontlines of a war that ended 18 years ago, but may never truly be over.