images from films

Assumpta Mugiraneza

Translator, Gacaca Film Series

Assumpta Mugiraneza has been working with Anne Aghion on translation of all her footage since the very first shoot. At first, she was one of eight translators. For the second film of the series, she shared the work with just one other translator. For MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER, she worked almost entirely alone. In total, Mugiraneza has translated close to 350 hours of footage. Having grown up in Rwanda, she left in the late eighties to pursue her clinical psychology studies in France, where she settled for close to a decade. After many members of her family perished in the genocide, she shifted her focus from clinical psychology to social and cognitive psychology and she started teaching at Paris VIII University. She also decided to focus her studies on the hate language of genocide, comparing the Nazi discourse with the propaganda of the extremist Hutu power movement. Working with Aghion, she realized there was a need for her special expertise to help bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between the accounts of ordinary Rwandans in the hills and filmmakers and other researchers. This led her to delve deeper into her own research and in 2008, to organize an international conference in Kigali on "Speaking, Thinking and Writing the History of the Genocide." She then co-edited the proceedings of this conference in a special issue of the Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah in Paris, on Rwanda 15 years after the genocide. She decided to return to Rwanda in late 2007 to raise her four children there.