Rwanda, Central African Republic Premiere at Cannes Un Certain Regard
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- Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo and Rafiki Fariala will become the first filmmakers from Rwanda and the Central African Republic, respectively, to have films in the Cannes Film Festival's official selection, both premiering in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.
- Dusabejambo's "Ben'Imana," a post-genocide drama about women rebuilding their lives, is an African-majority co-production between Rwanda, Gabon, France, and Norway, filmed in Kinyarwanda after she resisted financier pressure to switch to French or English.
- Fariala's "Congo Boy" is an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a young Congolese refugee pursuing a singing career in CAR, cast entirely with non-professional actors — including real-life soldiers playing the gun-toting teenagers manning roadblocks and shooting up clubs.
- Fariala broke ground in 2022 when his documentary "We, Students!" became the first feature from the Central African Republic to play at the Berlinale; he was trained at Ateliers Varan's Bangui workshop and drew crew from CinéBangui, a program backed by Lyon's CinéFabrique film school.
- Dusabejambo was mentored at Kigali's Almond Tree filmmaking collective by Lee Isaac Chung — then an unknown filmmaker shooting "Munyurangabo" in Rwanda, later the director of "Minari" — and developed "Ben'Imana" over more than a decade at Cannes' La Fabrique Cinéma, Marrakech's Atlas Workshops, and the Ouaga Film Lab.
Why it matters: Two of the world's youngest and most underrepresented film industries will appear on cinema's most prestigious stage for the first time, and both directors explicitly pushed back against the international co-production machine — Dusabejambo to keep her script in Kinyarwanda, Fariala to cast untrained locals and real soldiers — preserving the cultural specificity that financing partners routinely pressure African filmmakers to abandon.
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