An astonishing testament to the liberating power of speech, IN RWANDA WE SAY... THE FAMILY THAT DOES NOT SPEAK DIES is an important, intimate and fascinating examination of how, and whether, people can overcome fear, hatred and deep emotional scars after genocide, to forge a common future.

Over the past several years award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion has traveled to rural Rwanda to chart the progress and impact of the ethnic reconciliation programs there. IN RWANDA WE SAY... continues her quest to learn how the human spirit survives a trauma like the 1994 attempt to wipe out the Tutsi minority, which claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days.

Aghion's influential 2002 film Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? (also distributed by First Run / Icarus Films) captured the testimonies of both survivors and killers in the remote community of Ntongwe, as the government was preparing the Gacaca tribunals, a new system of citizen-based justice intended to handle over 100,000 genocide suspects languishing in detention.

IN RWANDA WE SAY... returns two years later, as close to 16,000 of these suspects, still untried, are released across the country. Having confessed to their crimes, and having served the maximum sentence the Gacaca tribunals would eventually impose, perpetrators of appalling crimes are sent home to plow fields and fetch water alongside the people they victimized.

IN RWANDA WE SAY... focused on the release of one suspect, tracking the effect of his return on a tiny hillside hamlet. While the government's message of a "united Rwandan family" permeates the language of the community, the imposed co-existence brings forth varying emotions, from numb acceptance to repressed rage. Violence seems to lurk just below the surface.

What unfolds, however, is astonishing. Little by little, people begin to talk in a profound, articulate way - first to the camera, and then to each other - as these neighbors negotiate the emotional task of accepting life side by side.

"One of the most remarkable documentaries you are likely to see this year."—Connecticut Post

"With extraordinary sensitivity, Aghion takes us into the heart of the problem of reconciliation in a post-genocidal society - not with wordy abstractions but with the earthy, real expressions of the people, victims and accused criminals, who must try to live together. Those seeking to know whether reconciliation is possible in Rwanda must look for their answer in this compelling expression of Rwandan voices."—Alison des Forges, Senior Advisor to Human Rights Watch, Africa

"Aghion has taken her camera deep into Rwandan life, to chronicle how the country's survivors and perpetrators are trying to live together anew. The narrative is carried by the tension that shows plainly in the faces of Aghion's subjects, in their difficult but always poetic words, in their long silences, in the haunting thunder and rain that roar over the deeply rural and impoverished place called Gafumba. There are no bodies in Aghion's films. Her work focuses on life after the genocide, on the lives of the living."—Washington Post

"Recommended!"—Educational Media Reviews Online