Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination

Bryce contextualizes Sometimes in April within the larger framework of films on the genocide, such as 100 Days (2001), Hotel Rwanda (2005), Shooting Dogs (2005), Munyurangabo (2006), A Sunday in Kigali (2006), and Kinyarwanda (2011), to demonstrate how Peck avoids the traditional binary that represents Africa as poor and corrupted and the West as rich and democratic in order to tell a nuanced story about human relationships and the complexity of culture as well as the interconnectedness of time, space, history, and memory.In chapter 5, "On the Edge of Silence: L'(In)imaginable and Gendered Representations of the Rwandan Genocide from Photography to Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April" Myriam J. A. Chancy challenges the silence of trauma through gendered lenses by examining representations of the genocide in the works of two photographers, white South African Pieter Hugo and Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado, as well as in Sometimes in April.Focusing on four of the film's female characters-Michaělle, Anaise, Ludivine, and The Girl in Blue- Hamilton-Wray examines the ways in which Peck positions women at the center of the film and grants them a space to critically analyze Haitian society, masculinity, and power through their encounter and relation with the main character, Jean-de-Dieu Théogene, inspired by former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.[...]he presents a documentary that is as much about colonialism, oppression, exoticization, power, and greed as it is about Lumumba.