Out of Africa

A Guernsey-born film producer followed Scottish midwife Lesley Bilinda as she returned to Rwanda to track down the killers of her Tutsi husband in the 1994 genocide. Shaun Shackleton talked to Ray Tostevin about his documentary, Hunting My Husband's Killers

MONTROSE-BORN midwife Lesley Bilinda was sent to Rwanda by Christian charity Tearfund in 1989 and started work in the town of Gahini.

Two tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi, populated it but she never found that an issue. The people were amiable and she made many friends.

One was a handsome pastor and English teacher, Charles, who was a Tutsi.

They were married in 1993 in two ceremonies - a traditional tribal wedding and a church service - and her family travelled all the way from Scotland to be with her. They were sad because she had decided to live there for the rest of her life, so far from them, but they realised that she was happy with Charles.

The couple set up home in the town, where they both worked to help locals improve their lives.

Within months, the threat of civil war saw tribal race issues intensify, with Tutsis like Charles in fear of their lives. In fact, he was so scared that he kept a six-foot spear behind his door.

After an argument over a suspected affair, Lesley went on a week's holiday in Kenya with her sister, leaving Charles in Gahini. It was April 1994.

On the day she was due to return, the hotel manager said that she should not go back to Rwanda. She asked why and he explained that racial tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis had spilled over into mass murder after Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down over the capital city of Kigali.

Government officials and radio stations claimed that it was a Tutsi rebellion and Hutus were ordered to exterminate the Tutsis.

Lesley desperately tried to find out if Charles was safe, but the country's poor communications network made it nigh-on impossible.

She spent a long time trying to track down a phone to contact friends in Rwanda.

In the meantime she listened to the BBC World Service every hour for updates - and every hour the situation was getting worse.

As Charles didn't have a phone, she couldn't get through to him. She never did. With no way of getting any information, Lesley had no choice but to return to Scotland with her sister.

Three months later, when she came back to Rwanda to search for her husband, her sister-in-law confirmed her worst fears: he had been seized by soldiers, taken away and killed.

He was one of nearly a million men, women and children who, in three months, had been slaughtered - 50,000 of them in just four days at the Murambi Polytechnic in Gikongoro, which is now a national genocide memorial site.

Her story has been made into a compulsive and meticulous film called Hunting My Husband's Killers.

St Martin's-raised director Ray Tostevin, of Grace Productions, and director of photography Phil Knox, of Purple Flame Media, were in Rwanda in August 2003 filming with Tearfund's Transform teams. The trip coincided with the first presidential elections since the genocide.

They came across many stories - from inspiration to desolation - and this started the ball rolling about telling Rwanda's story in an accessible way.

In October 2003, the team was put in contact with Lesley Bilinda and they began hearing something of her powerful and moving story.

A meeting with Lesley in Edinburgh led to some on-camera interviews.

'Lesley was considering going back,' said Ray. 'It was something that she had never fully dealt with but she was keen to establish the facts.'

In March 2004, the crew, Lesley and her sister, Sue, travelled to Rwanda. The filming took place the following month, with Lesley chasing various leads about her husband's death.

Her search spread all over the country, where she talked to convicted genocide killers, including a man called Gasto who admitted, as part of a gang, to killing Lesley's best friend and colleague, Anatolie.

She felt absolute disgust, but also pity for him.

She met Paster Kabeira, the manager of the guest house where Charles was last seen. He is alleged to have collaborated with Hutu rebels and was seen handing Charles over to armed militants. He is now in prison but will not admit he did anything wrong. The meeting left Lesley frustrated and upset but she refused to give up.

Along the way she visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial site to confront the scale of the slaughter. Its full horror brings her to her knees.

She also unearthed some painful and unpalatable truths about her husband, a man she thought she knew.

Although Hunting My Husband's Killers was shown in November 2004 at the International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam, and the DocNZ festival in New Zealand to very positive feedback and has been broadcast in the Netherlands and Ireland, its official launch as a two-disc special edition DVD was on Wednesday.

This was a double celebration as Lesley Bilinda's book, With What Remains, the story of her journey, was launched on the same night.

The film has gained some high-profile praise. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has described it as 'deeply, hauntingly moving,' and award-winning BBC foreign correspondent Fergal Keane has said he had found it 'powerful beyond words.'

But it seems that the story of Rwanda, for Ray Tostevin at least, doesn't end there.

Although these tribunals will attempt reconciliation between the Hutus and the Tutsis as well as offer a voice and a catharsis to survivors, critics have said that the system is fraught with potential pitfalls.Minimally trained judges will preside over complex cases, false accusations or confessions are possible and revenge or fear of such will affect testimonies.

Ray believes that there is still much healing to be done in Rwanda.

'The physical wounds are gone but the emotional ones are still there. It will take a long time to resolve. What people say in public isn't what they say or think in private.'

Having been there and filmed and talked to its people, Ray has strong views as to why the Rwandan genocide happened.

'This has never been about ethnic tensions between the Hutus and the Tutsis. It is easy to dismiss it as Africans fighting among each other.'

He believes it goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries and the Belgian and French colonialists.

Jean-Christophe had been sent by the president to head France's special Africa Unit. He was popularly known in Africa as 'Papa m'a dit' or 'Daddy told me to'.

In the meantime, Ray and Grace Productions are busy on other films. My MMR Babies is a documentary about a Somerset mother's battle to prove her children were made autistic through that vaccination.

Another follows the Luxembourg royal family during the Second World War and examines the role played by Grand Duchess Charlotte in boosting her country's morale.

'As Churchill's speeches galvanised the British,' said Ray, 'so too did Charlotte's to the people of Luxembourg.'

He is also in discussion with Channel 4 about making a film concerning the energy gap.

In an age when some documentaries rely more on the relaxed and often humorous persona of their presenters - Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me and Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, for example - it comes as a refreshing change that there are film-makers like Ray Tostevin making accessible, thought-provoking and essential documentaries about real people with real stories to tell.

* Hunting My Husband's Killers is now available in a two-disc special edition from Grace Productions. Visit www.agraceproduction.com

With What Remains: A Woman's Search for Truth in the Country That Murdered Her Husband, by Lesley Bilinda, is published by Hodder & Stoughton.