100 Days

Colour, 35mm
Velká Británie/Rwanda, 2001, 99 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

A drama from the still recent civil war in Rwanda which claimed the lives of approximately 1,000,000 people. In this small country in the heart of equatorial Africa, the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis reached a peak in the nineties, resulting in the Hutu committing genocide against their weaker rivals. Director Nick Hughes was a cameraman working for the BBC in Rwanda at the time of these events, and in 1999 he decided to treat this urgent topic as a feature film. The work chronicles the genocide (from April to July 1994) while using a simple though tragic love story as its vehicle. The lovely Josette and young Baptiste come from respected Tutsi families. The couple is separated during the unrest that follows the Rwandan president’s death, and thoughts of retribution grow among the Hutus. Baptiste manages to escape from the first massacre, and Josette and her family take refuge in a nearby church overseen by a vile Hutu priest. But the days of the apocalypse are only just beginning. Hughes makes use of the beautiful natural environment as a counterpoint to human horror. The director avoids naturalism in favour of an aesthetic approach to death, and thus this insistent work can also engage those who are “afraid” of such a violent topic.

About the director

Nick Hughes (b. 1961, London) graduated in electrical engineering from Bristol University, but beginning in 1989 worked as a cameraman in Africa (mainly for the BBC). He captured events in Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and, of course, in Rwanda. In this way he participated in the making of fifty documentaries, but was also openly involved in various operations connected with African armed conflicts. As a director he made the television drama Ndoto ya Daudi (1993), the documentaries Provence (1995), and Big Fish, Small Fry (1996) and the feature 100 Days (2001). He has also shot commercials (Colgate, Mercedes, Tetra Pak, Raid). He lives in Africa and owns Vivid Features Ltd. (with headquarters in Kenya and Nigeria), a production company that cooperates with CNN.