Cultural Season to begin

The Center’s new cultural season will begin August 15 with the opening of Lessons from Rwanda: The United Nations and Prevention of Genocide. This exhibit is a production of Aegis Trust for genocide prevention in partnership with the United Nations Department of Public Information.

The exhibit forms part of an outreach program established by the U.N. General Assembly in December 2005. It presents an account of the events taking place before, during, and after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Its purpose is to raise awareness of the lessons to be learned from those events, and in particular the lasting impact of genocide on survivors and their communities.

The exhibit – which is available in English, French, Kinyarwanda and Spanish – was launched in New York at UN Headquarters in April 2007 and has subsequently been displayed throughout the world. The exhibit will be at the Center until October 27.

On September 18 our film series will begin with As We Forgive, a documentary featuring four neighbors who were caught up in one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern times. Overwhelmed by an enormous backlog of court cases, Rwanda had to create a new solution: Reconciliation. We see this process through the stories of two Rwandan women as they come face-to-face with the men – former friends – who slaughtered their families during the conflict that resulted in the deaths of about 20% of the nation’s population.

The return of 50,000 perpetrators back to the communities they helped destroy, and the process of reunification and reintegration, requires extraordinary courage from survivors, government, churches and community leaders. In this film, director Laura Waters Hinson and narrator Mia Farrow explore these issues, asking the most painful question of all: is it possible to forgive and move forward? And if that is a possibility, how can it be done?