Best Newcomer Feature (2014)
A Place for Everyone
Angelos Rallis & Hans Ulrich Gößl
Belgium
About the Film
Is it possible to create “A Place for Everyone”, for victims and killers, after a genocide took place? As small children Benoite and Tharcisse, the two protagonists of this documentary film, grew up next to each other and played together on the same fields in a small village in the mountains of Rwanda. What separated them is the fact that Benoite belonged to the ethnic group of Tutsis and Tharcisse to the one of Hutus.
During the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 Benoite’s entire family got killed, whereas Tharcisse’s father was among the ones carrying out the killings. Two decades later, perpetrators and survivors live again together door to door in Tharcisse’s and Benoite’s home village. “A Place for Everyone” portrays how this traumatised society struggles with a fragile reconciliation process in the aftermath of its genocide.
Filmed over a period of four years and through the perspective of Benoite and Tharcisse the documentary film “A Place for Everyone” raises questions on the psychological and sociological impact of genocide and portrays a generation of young survivors full of hidden desire for love, hate and forgiveness.
About the Directors
Angelos Rallis, born in 1979, is a Greek National who studied social sciences, filmmaking and photography in Athens, Stockholm and London. He worked for several years for the Greek National Television as a Director as well as photographer on his own long term projects and for press agencies in the UK, Belgium, China, Central Asia and Africa. He currently lives and works between UK and Greece.
Hans Ulrich Gößl, born in 1979, is an Austrian national, studied communication science and European politics in Vienna, London and Bruges. He lives and works as a communication specialist and audio-visual producer in Brussels and has been travelling to Rwanda since 2007 with an Austrian development organisation.
A Place for Everyone is their first film.
