I grew up in the mid ‘90s, hearing stories of young women who had been abducted and forced into marriages with strangers. Having lost their most prized asset, their virginity, these unwilling brides would find themselves stuck in a situation where fleeing back to their families would mean living a life of shame and scorn. They were considered damaged goods.
These women took on the role and mission of not simply obedient wives, but resuscitators of nearly extinct families.
Some of my own aunts were forced into non-consensual marriages and a few of my uncles built their own families this way. And those couples still exist decades later. Their children have grown up and they are regular members of the community, all as if there was no original sin at the genesis of these families. I grew up asking myself how I would have dealt with a forced marriage myself. Would I have given up on my dreams? Would I have accepted to have regular sex with a stranger? Would I have been courageous? Rebellious? Accommodating? Compliant? Would I have chosen to see the bigger picture: a renewal of the family unit in the wake of a genocide where many men and women in my community had been massacred? These questions haunted me and led to the writing of my debut film, THE BRIDE.
The experience of the character Eva was my worst nightmare, and it became urgent for me to tell this story as a feature film.
Set a couple years after the genocide against the Tutsi, the film takes place during a particularly traumatic era for the entire country of Rwanda. These forced marriages became a particularly painful reality for those abductee brides who found themselves “married” to broken men, like the character of Silas, a former soldier who returned to find his family massacred. These women took on the role and mission of not simply obedient wives, but resuscitators of nearly extinct families.
Rwanda is a country that has made enormous progress in the protection of women and girls rights. But with this film, I wanted to shed a light on this almost forgotten reality of a Rwanda that seems so distant even as the final victims of these traditional marriages live among us, carrying unimaginable and unseen wounds. To those who stayed and those who ran away, this film is my tribute to their resilience.
Myriam U. Birara
