It's a tragic fact that cinema understands genocide. The Holocaust came to be widely understood largely through film, from horrific newsreel footage to Nuit et brouillard to Schindler's List and beyond. Even the far less explored Cambodian genocide has been powerfully illuminated by documentaries like S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and fiction films like The Killing Fields. Cinema's capacity for realistic representation, combined with its reach and emotional force, gives it an unsought prominence in this area.
Rwanda is the latest sorry chapter in history to benefit from cinema's power. During the fifteen years since the 1994 genocide, there has already been a gathering tide of films seeking to understand the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. To date, those films have largely taken the form of epic, moral drama. The Day God Walked Away offers a new approach. Dry-eyed and disciplined, this remarkable debut follows one woman as the horror descends on her world. It is genocide in miniature, and all the more heartbreaking for that.
Jacqueline, a young Tutsi, works for a European family in Kigali. When the rampaging thugs draw closer to their home, the family members flee, leaving Jacqueline to hide trembling in the attic. Director Philippe van Leeuw constructs this sequence as a harrowing piece of experiential cinema, keeping close to Jacqueline in a confined space as threats come at her from all sides.
Even when Jacqueline escapes, van Leeuw maintains a first-person perspective. A cinematographer – he shot Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus – he frames Jacqueline in widescreen images that emphasize her confinement and isolation. As she becomes an outcast from her village and seeks tentative safety with a wounded man, the vast scale of Rwanda's carnage and displacement is distilled into the experience of one woman. The effect is remarkable.
Cameron Bailey
Philippe van Leeuw was born in Brussels and studied at L'Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He has served as cinematographer on over a dozen feature films, including Bruno Dumont's
La Vie de Jésus (96) and Claire Simon's
God's Offices (07).
The Day God Walked Away (09) is his first feature film as a director.