To understand what Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo achieved when she won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes on May 23, 2026, you have to go back nearly twenty years, to a film set in Kigali where a young Rwandan college graduate joined a filmmaking collective run by an then-unknown director who was shooting his first feature in Rwanda. The director was Lee Isaac Chung. The collective was called the Almond Tree. The first feature was Munyurangabo. And Chung would go on, more than a decade later, to make Minari — the film that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and received Academy Award and BAFTA nominations and became one of the most celebrated American films of its year.
Dusabejambo learned filmmaking in that collective. Under Chung’s mentorship, she directed the short film Lyiza, which premiered at Tribeca and began her career-long cinematic engagement with the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath. The line from that Kigali film set to the Cannes stage where she accepted the Caméra d’Or runs through twenty years of patient, specific, uncompromising work.
The Decision That Defined the Film
The most important decision Dusabejambo made about Ben’Imana was a decision about language. Financiers pressured her, as African filmmakers are routinely pressured, to make the film in French or English — the languages that ease international sales, that comfort European co-producers, that widen the festival and distribution path. She refused.
“We can do this,” she said, recounting the decision. “It’s not always that the European countries must have that. There’s a new wave of African filmmakers coming up, and we really wanted to keep this sovereignty.” The film is in Kinyarwanda. The crew, she has said, was “90% Rwandan and 100% African.” The cast is almost entirely non-professional — Rwandan people, many of them, telling a Rwandan story in the Rwandan language.
That word — sovereignty — is the one that defines her. Not access. Not representation. Not the visibility that comes from making your film legible to a European audience. Sovereignty: the insistence on owning the story completely, on her own terms, in her own language, with her own people. The Caméra d’Or jury — judging the best debut across the entire festival — chose that film. The sovereignty was not a barrier to recognition. It was the reason for it.
What the Film Carries
Ben’Imana — the title means “the people of God” — follows Vénéranda, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi who has built her life around reconciliation and the community justice process of gacaca, and whose carefully constructed peace fractures when her teenage daughter becomes pregnant. The film took ten years to develop, moving through La Fabrique Cinéma, the Marrakech Atlas Workshops, the Ouaga Film Lab, and financing from the Berlinale World Cinema Fund and the Red Sea Souk. It is the feature that her Tribeca short Lyiza was building toward across her entire career.
Of the Rwandan women who shared their memories of the genocide with her during the film’s research, Dusabejambo has said: “People gave so much to this film. Now I have a story to go back and tell them.” That sentence describes a specific ethical relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects — one in which the film is not extracted from the community but returned to it. The women gave their stories. The film gives them back, transformed into something they can watch and recognise. The Caméra d’Or is, among other things, a recognition of that ethical relationship made visible on screen.
What Comes Next
Dusabejambo is now the most internationally recognised Rwandan filmmaker in history and one of the most significant new voices in African cinema. The Caméra d’Or is a launching prize — it identifies filmmakers at the start of careers that the prize itself helps to build. Past winners have gone on to define international art cinema for decades. What Dusabejambo does next will be watched by everyone who pays attention to where cinema is going.
What we know from her public statements is that she intends to keep working in Kinyarwanda, keep telling Rwandan stories, keep the sovereignty that defined Ben’Imana. The new wave of African filmmakers she described — the ones who do not accept that European languages and European frameworks are the price of international recognition — now has its most prominent proof of concept. She learned from the director of Minari. She made something entirely her own. And the best film festival in the world named it the best debut of the year.
This profile draws on Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s public statements during the Cannes 2026 campaign. — Amara Diallo, Cannes. RollCallAfrica, 24 May 2026. Sources: The Hollywood Reporter (May 2026 — Dusabejambo interview), Variety (May 2026 — Cannes/Ben’Imana, Lee Isaac Chung background), Festival de Cannes official (Caméra d’Or, 23 May 2026), Berlinale World Cinema Fund.
