Kinyarwanda currently stands as the best feature film about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The film, however, does not offer any new insights or information about the catastrophe, which lasted for months and consumed nearly a million lives, and it has a very simple (indeed, predictable) overall message: Forgiveness is what makes us human. (This message, the humanity of forgiveness, is better and more deeply communicated in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt.) What makes Kinyarwanda great are two things: one, the cinematography (like Caroline Kamya’s Imani, a Ugandan film, it captures the beauty of black skin and the African landscape), and two, the performances (particularly the woman warrior Lt. Rose, played by Cassandra Freeman). The story revolves around a pretty young woman, Jean (Hadidja Zaninka), who goes on a date and returns home to find her parents have been butchered. The film pieces together a social maze that has at its center the murder of the young woman’s parents. Because revenge can only complicate or worsen this maze, the most reasonable thing Jean (and others like her) can do is exit it. That exit is forgiveness.