I Have Seen My Last Born (2015)

• 83%
• 2015
• Documentary
• Samuel Gray Anderson
• Lee Isaac Chung

Marking their first directorial work in Rwanda since the award-winning narrative film, Munyurangabo, I Have Seen My Last Born tells the story of Jean Kwezi, a man who survived the wars that marked Eastern Congo and Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s. As Jean navigates the roles of father and son, between the growing city center and the village tied to his past, his story reveals a country in transition. The drama of the film takes place in the act of recollection, in the reassessment of history and the way in which that informs present daily life. Now 39 years old, Jean was marked profoundly as a young adult by the 1994 genocide: separated from his family, taken to Kigali, only re-uniting with them a couple of years later, long after they had assumed him dead. Jean recounts the memory of a long family history shaped by migrations between the Congo and Rwanda, during which biological children were lost and adoptive children gained. This memory carries into the present through Jean's daily life in Kigali, where he works as a filmmaker and forges a relationship with a teenage daughter whom he abandoned in the years following the genocide. The dramatic events of Jean's reunion with his parents and, much later, his daughter, have already taken place; but the deep emotions stirred by these remain present, as testified both by Jean's passion in recounting his decision to find his daughter and by the joy of his visit to his family's home. Each moment echoes the continuing power of these events and the vitality with which Jean has emerged from a dark past to live with a new purpose.