When the 2026 Cannes official selection was announced and Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana appeared in Un Certain Regard, the international film press published a fact: first Rwandan film in the Cannes official selection. That fact is accurate and worth stating. But it is not the story. The story is what produced it — and that story has been unfolding, methodically and without much fanfare, in Kigali for the better part of fifteen years.
I have been covering East African cinema from Nairobi since 2001. I have watched Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda move through different phases of film industry development — some organic, some state-directed, some driven entirely by diaspora filmmakers returning with foreign training and international relationships. Rwanda’s path has been the most deliberately engineered of all of them. The Cannes selection is not an accident. It is the declared interest on a patient investment.
What Rwanda Has Been Building
The Rwanda Film Festival — Hillywood — was founded in 2005, less than a decade after the genocide. Its founding logic was stated plainly: cinema is how a society processes what it has been through, and Rwanda needed the tools to do that processing on its own terms. For a decade, Hillywood functioned primarily as an exhibition and education initiative — bringing films to rural communities via mobile cinema, training young Rwandans in basic production skills, creating an audience before there was an industry to serve it.
In 2010, the government of Rwanda began treating the film sector as a component of its broader economic development strategy — the same strategy that had produced the Kigali Convention Centre, the aggressive tech infrastructure investment, and the push to make Rwanda a regional hub for services and conferences. Film was not a priority in the way that fintech or tourism were priorities. But it was on the table. The Rwanda Development Board began classifying film production as an exportable service. Tax incentives for foreign productions shooting in Rwanda were introduced, revised, and improved over a five-year period. By 2018, the country was attracting enough international commercial production to have built meaningful on-the-ground crew capacity.
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That crew capacity is what trained Dusabejambo’s collaborators on Ben’Imana.
The Film and What It Is
Ben’Imana — a Rwanda-Gabon-Côte d’Ivoire-France-Norway co-production — tells the story of a family navigating the slow, complicated return of a relative who disappeared during the 1994 genocide and has only now resurfaced. The co-production geography tells its own story: Dusabejambo assembled financing from five territories to make this film, which means she understood from the beginning that the film’s subject matter and its formal ambitions required a financial architecture broader than any single national fund could provide.
This is a skill. It is not a natural skill — it is a developed skill, built through the kind of industry training and international festival relationships that take years to cultivate. Dusabejambo’s presence at Cannes is the result of her own talent meeting an ecosystem that was prepared to support it. Both things had to be true. In Rwanda in 2026, both things are true.
The East African Pattern and What It Predicts
From Nairobi, I can see the same patient infrastructure-building happening in at least two other East African territories. Kenya’s consistent Sundance presence — with Kikuyu Land in the World Cinema Documentary Competition this year, following How to Build a Library in 2025 — is not a coincidence. It is the result of years of investment from the Sundance Institute’s East African programmes, combined with a generation of Kenyan filmmakers who have developed international co-production skills with an intentionality their predecessors did not have access to.
Ethiopia is the territory I am watching most closely. A country of 120 million people with a rich cinematic tradition — the Haile Gerima lineage, the Ethiopian Film Corporation’s archive — that is currently under-resourced at the industry level but producing individual filmmakers of genuine international quality. When an Ethiopian film appears in competition at a major European festival, it will feel, to the international press, like a sudden arrival. It will not be sudden. The ground is being prepared now.
Rwanda’s moment at Cannes is a signal. The question for the rest of East Africa is whether it is a motivation or a warning — whether it accelerates the infrastructure work that is already underway, or produces the kind of envious inertia that mistakes a neighbour’s success for evidence that the space is already occupied.
The space is not occupied. It is barely begun.
— Wanjiru Kamau covers East and Central African cinema from Nairobi. She has attended every edition of the Zanzibar International Film Festival since its 2001 inaugural.
