April Tragedy (2024)

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire

The story of Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire and his controversial command of the United Nations mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The documentary was inspired by the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda which was published in 2003.

Jeju Prayer

Focusing on Mrs. Kang Sang-hee’s life, she lost her husband in the Jeju Uprising (March 3rd, 1948). The film views the dark-side of Jeju Island, a huge grave, which is completely opposite of the other side of the island, the famous tourist attraction. It says that the tragedy has been going on about the recent Gang-jeong village situation.

The Faces We Lost

A documentary about how Rwandans use personal and family photographs to remember and commemorate the loved ones they lost in the 1994 genocide.

Until the Stones Speak

There are five grandmothers, four of whom went to Jeonju Prison due to the Jeju 4.3. All of them were young people around the age of 20 at the time of the incident in 1948. The outline of the incident is formed when hearing the experiences of those who were sent to prison without trial particularly as women. The audience feels indescribable emotions by the fact that they have lived on despite what they had gone through, things that are just too much for a human being to bear.

Soup and Ideology

Confronting half of her mother’s life—her mother who had survived the Jeju April 3 Incident—the director tries to scoop out disappearing memories. A tale of family, which carries on from Dear Pyongyang, carving out the cruelty of history, and questioning the precarious existence of the nation-state.

Rwanda : the silence of words

Their words had never been heard before. Co-directed by French-Rwandan musician and author Gaël Faye and director Michael Sztanke, this movie records with sensitivity and for the first time the testimonies of Prisca, Marie-Jeanne and Concessa about their lives during the genocide and after. The three Tutsi women tell the camera about their daily lives during the genocide and in the refugee camps of Murambi and Nyarushishi, where they lived a nightmare under the guard of the French soldiers of the Opération Turquoise who, under a UN mandate, where supposed to protect them. While the French army denies any rape accusation, the three women filed complaints with the French justice system in 2004 and 2012. The investigation is now at a standstill.

Shooting Dogs

Two westerners, a priest and a teacher find themselves in the middle of the Rwandan genocide and face a moral dilemna. Do they place themselves in danger and protect the refugees, or escape the country with their lives? Based on a true story.

Blood Diamond

An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.

The Constant Gardener

Justin Quayle is a low-level British diplomat who has always gone about his work very quietly, not causing any problems. But after his radical wife Tessa is killed he becomes determined to find out why, thrusting himself into the middle of a very dangerous conspiracy.

Hotel Rwanda

Inspired by true events, this film takes place in Rwanda in the 1990s when more than a million Tutsis were killed in a genocide that went mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world. Hotel owner Paul Rusesabagina houses over a thousand refuges in his hotel in attempt to save their lives.

A Sunday in Kigali

In April 1994, the middle-aged Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt is making a documentary in Kigali about AIDS. He secretly falls in love for the Tutsi waitress of his hotel Gentille, who is younger than him, in a period of violent racial conflicts. When the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda begins, Bernard does not succeed in escaping with Gentille to Canada. When the genocide finishes in July 1994, Bernard returns to the chaotic Kigali seeking out Gentille in the middle of destruction and dead bodies.

Shake Hands with the Devil

In 1993, Canadian Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire was sent by the United Nations to Rwanda as commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). Its mission, to ensure the ceasefire, is underfunded, excessively bureaucratized and made up of military units which come from dozens of countries and which each have a very different program... These are Lt Gen Dallaire's efforts to stop the madness of the Rwandan Genocide, despite the complete indifference of his superiors.

Trees of Peace

Four women from different backgrounds forge an unbreakable sisterhood while trapped and in hiding during the genocide in Rwanda.

Birds Are Singing in Kigali

We meet ornithologist Anna in 1994 just as genocide is raging in Rwanda, perpetrated by the majority Hutus against the Tutsis. Anna manages to save the daughter of a colleague whose family has been murdered, and she takes her to Poland. But the woman returns to Rwanda to visit the graves of her loved ones. The director originally worked on the movie with her husband Krzysztof Krauze (My Nikifor – Crystal Globe, KVIFF 2005), but after his death in 2014 she eventually finished this challenging picture alone.

Kinyarwanda

A young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man fall in love amid chaos; a soldier struggles to foster a greater good while absent from her family; and a priest grapples with his faith in the face of unspeakable horror.

Hervé Guibert, la mort propagande

From this "inexorable disease", Hervé Guibert did not recover. The miracle he had so much hoped for did not happen. But, before his death in 1991, three years after learning of his HIV-positive status, he engraved in his literary and photographic work "the places of [his] suffering", "the stations of [his] way of the cross". With his thin body and sunken cheeks, the handsome man with curly hair that he was, the one whose clear gaze radiated from the seaside photos, fought a fierce battle against AIDS. A fight of every moment against the decay of the body, observed and commented with a methodical care in his autobiographical novels, in particular "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life" (1990) and "The Compassionate Protocol" (1991), and of which he testified on television on the set of "Apostrophes"...

The World of Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the great novels of world literature. The documentary immerses itself in the very own cosmos, spanning 3,000 pages and hundreds of characters, for which Proust's own world was the source of inspiration, and brings Proust's moral portrait of the Belle Epoque to new life.

Spaccio Capitale

Plot unavailable

When My Knife Strikes You

Shot in various villages throughout Yugoslavia, this is a disturbing document of a time when people were stabbing each other with knives without any real reason. Murderers, people who witness these murders and the families of victims all talk about the senseless violence and the human condition.

Murita Cycles

Filmmaker Barry Braverman's documentary about his father, Murray.

Dream of the Wild Horses

The horses in Denys Colomb Daunant’s dream poem are the white beasts of the marshlands of the Camargue in South West France. Daunant was haunted by these creatures. His obsession was first visualized when he wrote the autobiographical script for Albert Lamorisse’s award-winning 1953 film White Mane. In this short the beauty of the horses is captured with a variety of film techniques and by Jacques Lasry’s beautiful electronic score.

Heaven Adores You

Heaven Adores You is an intimate, meditative inquiry into the life and music of Elliott Smith. By threading the music of Elliott Smith through the dense, yet often isolating landscapes of the three major cities he lived in -- Portland, New York City, Los Angeles -- Heaven Adores You presents a visual journey and an earnest review of the singer's prolific songwriting and the impact it continues to have on fans, friends, and fellow musicians.

Brothers in Arms: The Untold Story of the 502

This riveting 2-part series hosted by Ron Livingston of HBO's "Band of Brothers" weaves together archival footage, sophisticated computer animation and interviews with actual WWII veterans in order to tell the complete story of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment's accomplishments during D-Day and the subsequent week.

Sister J

Lim Jaechun, who worked as a factory worker for 30 years and was suddenly laid off, spent 10 years in a tent as a sit-in. Director Lee Soojung calls her ‘sister J’. 10 years into the fight for reinstatement, Jaechun now writes, plays guitar, and sings while living in a tent. She says her personality has changed after 7 years of being laid-off from “originally timid” to being very lively. Sister J deals with a struggle for reinstatement, but it is actually a film about a single person, as stated in the title. This documentary brings artistic vitality to the ‘4,464 days’ Sister J spends on the site, with lines and music driven from the forms of the play into the cinema.

Sasang: The Town on Sand

This is a film about workers, a film about the poor who were dragged out of homes and about his father. Director Park films his father who has lived as a laborer all his life, his weakened body, and nine years of time flowing over it. Park brings an impartial view of his father’s life. His father does not try to impart a particular value in front of the camera. What remains is to wonder where this cruel reality comes from.

Song Hae 1927

Song Hae 1927 is a documentary about the character all Koreans know. Song Hae is the oldest active celebrity at 94 and the longest-running host of the ‘National Singing Contest.’ He has been a singer, comedian, actor, and radio DJ, but never a star. Song Hae 1927 shows a backstage face we’ve never seen. His closed eyes and serious look seem like a good place to hide sadness and pain. Song Hae is a man of few words. To the death of his wife, he only said, ‘I wish I had had a chance to say goodbye to him.’

Good Light, Good Air

The title Good Light, Good Air is oddly paradoxical. Keenly working at the point where his artistic identity and persistent attention on modern Korean history meet, director Im in this film focused on where the history of oppression and struggle intersect between Gwangju and Buenos Aires. In both cities, a great number of people who fought against the dictatorship were slaughtered and disappeared. The people of both societies still live with that trauma. When the testimonies of the victims of the two cities cross over, the film gives us chills as the eerie history of the two is very similar. Through Good Light, Good Air, director Im asks us how we will remember the past from where we stand right now.

Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370

Initially technology fails to track a Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 when it mysteriously disappears. Can new evidence help locate the plane and finally solve aviation’s greatest mystery?