Jonas d’Adesky Explores Identity and Memory in ‘Kwibuka, Remember’: ‘I Wanted to Be Outside the Cliches’

Belgian-Rwandan filmmaker Jonas d’Adesky (“Twa Timoun”) brings his latest feature, “Kwibuka, Remember,” to the Red Sea Film Festival, a drama inspired by questions of identity and the long-term impact of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. The film follows Lia, a Belgian-Rwandan professional basketball player raised in Europe, who returns to Rwanda to play for the national team and finds herself confronting a family history she never fully understood.

D’Adesky says the project grew from his own experience navigating two cultures. “I wanted to talk about this feeling of living in one place but being linked to a second country, this desire people have to reconnect, to know, and understand.” He adds that portraying Rwanda beyond its most familiar narrative was equally important. “Rwanda often has this image of genocide that is very prevalent,” he says. “I wanted to make a film that takes place today and shows not only that history but the country in general, its energy, its vitality, and to be outside the cliches.”

As Lia settles into the team’s world, D’Adesky builds a narrative structure that mirrors her evolving sense of identity. “The film is really built on two lines,” he explains. “There’s a moment when she realizes that part of what she imagined about her past isn’t true. That leads her on a kind of quest. And there’s a resonance between what happens in the tournament and what happens in her personal search.”

For French-Rwandan actor Sonia Rolland, who plays Lia, portraying someone so disconnected from the country proved an unusual challenge. “I had to build everything,” she says. “I was born in Rwanda, I know the language, I go there several times a year. But Lia left too early, in dramatic conditions, without knowing her story. She has so many questions.”

The film includes scenes shot in memorial sites and underground crypts, still home to victims’ remains, spaces that pushed Rolland to navigate the line between the character and herself as a Rwandan woman. “It was confusing. I didn’t know if it was the actress or the woman expressing herself,” she says. “It created very strong, very real scenes.”

For D’Adesky, that blurring of emotional lines reflects one of the film’s central ideas. He describes “Kwibuka, Remember” as a work about how the past and present continually intersect. “The particularity of genocide is precisely the fact that its effects last a very, very long time,” he says. “It remains present somewhere, which impacts the present today.” Through the film, he sought to explore how those repercussions move across generations.

Both D’Adesky and Rolland say the film also reflects Rwanda’s broader story of rebuilding in the decades since the genocide. On the question of reconstruction, D’Adesky says, “It must be rebuilt by the Rwandans and not by someone who’s going to come from the outside,” drawing a parallel between Lia’s journey and the country’s own process of recovery.

Rolland adds that many audiences still underestimate the scale of Rwanda’s transformation. “People can’t imagine how much it took strength and vitality from the people in Rwanda,” she says. “Through the smaller story of Lia, we already understand the great story of Rwanda.”

The film’s title, “Kwibuka,” the Kinyarwanda word for the annual remembrance period, emerged only late in the edit, D’Adesky shares, but ultimately felt inseparable from the story. “You see the word everywhere during the commemoration,” D’Adesky says. “Little by little I found something poetic in the idea of memory and the journey she makes. The double title also resonates with the idea of double identity.”

Much of the film was shot in Rwanda, with roughly 80% of the crew drawn from the country’s growing production sector, a milestone for the local industry. “It is the biggest Rwandan film shot in the country with a Rwandan team,” D’Adesky says. “At the beginning it was complicated, but little by little there was a real progression.” He says building the project within Rwanda was always part of his intention. “Beyond what the film can become, that is already a kind of success.”

Rolland sees the production as part of a broader cultural shift. “It shows we’re able to make films that reflect the evolution of the country,” she says. “There’s a will now to support cultural projects, and that Rwanda is a safe, possible shooting destination.”