I first encountered Ben’Imana at Ouaga Film Lab in 2019. A young Rwandan filmmaker, an early-stage screenplay about a genocide survivor navigating the contradictions of the Gacaca reconciliation process, a room full of experienced people who recognised something real in what was being proposed but asked the question that every film about post-genocide Rwanda eventually faces: how do you tell this story without collapsing it into spectacle or testimony?
Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo answered that question over the following seven years. She did not answer it in that room. She answered it by making the film — by going to La Fabrique Cinéma at Cannes in 2022, by presenting at Durban FilmMart in 2024, by receiving the $40,000 post-production grant and $32,500 in-kind award from the Red Sea Souk in 2025, by assembling a five-country co-production structure (Rwanda, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, France, Norway), by casting almost entirely non-professional actors, and by arriving at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 with a completed film in Un Certain Regard and MK2 Films holding international sales rights.
Ben’Imana is the first film by a Rwandan director in the Cannes official selection in the festival’s history. The film is nominated for the Caméra d’Or — awarded annually to the best debut film across the entire festival, in all sections simultaneously. MK2 Films, whose recent catalogue includes the 2025 Palme d’Or winner, does not take films they do not believe in commercially as well as artistically.
The reasons this list is making this entry before Cannes has completed rather than after are specific. The Watchlist is not a recognition mechanism for events that have already happened. It is a forward-looking claim. Dusabejambo is on this list because the trajectory is clear and verifiable and points in one direction, and because RollCallAfrica wants the record to show that we identified it before the industry consensus forms. The seven years of development are evidence of method, not delay. The co-production architecture she assembled tells you she understands the business of filmmaking, not just the art of it. The choice of non-professional actors from the community being depicted tells you she understands the ethics of her subject. The Caméra d’Or nomination tells you that Cannes’s formal assessment of debut films agrees with ours.
Her second film, when it comes, will be made with the co-production relationships she built across seven years of development, the MK2 commercial relationship she has just established, and the formal authority of a filmmaker who spent a decade ensuring her debut was exactly what she meant it to be. That is the trajectory this Watchlist is committing to.
Territory: Rwanda · Role: Director, Screenwriter · Watch for: Ben’Imana Cannes screening and distribution announcements, May 2026; second feature development, 2026–2027
