didy

"How can you have a burial when there is no body?" This is the question posed by Didy, a hybrid investigative film that traces the civil wars, the arrival of HIV and the unprecedented violence and discrimination experienced by the Tutsi people from the 1960s onwards. Gaël Kamilindi immigrated to Switzerland at the age of seven and, like so many other Rwandans who settled abroad, the children of the 'post-genocide' period, he very quickly lost the language, memories and scents of his homeland. At the age of twenty, faced with this void, something clicked and he travelled to Burundi where his mother was buried - somewhere, or rather everywhere. This film, made with François-Xavier Destors, is his ritual, his ceremony. He feels his way, reviving his mother through his friend, the actress Kayije Kagame, who resembles her and who also bears the scars of her country as a legacy. He rekindles the memories of his surviving aunts, visits the graves of his ancestors, discovers sublime archives, puts the pieces of his pain back together, gradually finds and writes his place in this family, this history, this country, and leaves his mark.
Anne Delseth

François-Xavier Destors
didy, 2024
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Norilsk, l’étreinte de glace, 2018
Les Années 68, 2018
Les Voix de Srebrenica, 2015
Rwanda, la surface de réparation, 2014
Paris une histoire Capitale, 2012

Gaël Kamilindi
didy, 2024