Beyond porn

With Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo, handheld camerawork and patient visual framing produces a rare and affecting character intimacy that gets under your skin. Though there is little in the way of dramatic dialogue (by Hollywood standards), you really feel like you know and understand the film’s two teenage Rwandans, Munyurangabo (Jeff Rutagengwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye). They are journeying together to Munyurangabo’s village, where they intend to exact revenge on the man who murdered his father during the Rwandan genocide. Along the way, the youths stop to visit Sangwa’s family, where a fight with his belligerent father drove Sangwa away three years earlier. Over the course of two days, ethnic friction and familial longing start to unravel the teens’ friendship. Though to some, Munyurangabo’s pace will feel glacial, Chung and his indigenous actors let the characters’ backgrounds, struggles and personalities trickle out honestly. Deep kinship, jealousy, tenderness and resentment simultaneously fuel and thwart the teens’ desire to find reconciliation. Each desperately seeks connection, but encounters only estrangement — from family, from country and even from each other. It’s a quietly heartbreaking movie that makes clear the recent past that haunts every moment of Rwanda’s present.