‘Kwibuka, Remember’ review: Earnest, dutiful drama sees a basketball star return to her Rwanda home

Dir: Jonas D’Adesky. Belgium/Rwanda. 2025. 92mins

In Kwibuka, Remember, a basketball star returns to her homeland of Rwanda for the first time since childhood, quickly realising that the traumas of the past still remain. Belgian-Rwandan director Jonas D’Adesky’s earnest film features Sonia Rolland as the ageing athlete who learns that the brother she thought died during the 1994 genocide may, in fact, still be alive. That mystery provides the picture with its narrative thrust, but a melodramatic approach tends to muffle a heartfelt story about reconciliation and regret.

Fails to be sufficiently memorable

Screening at Red Sea, Kwibuka, Remember is the second feature from D’Adesky, whose 2012 debut Twa Timoun unspooled in Toronto and Berlin. Although his new picture’s protagonist plays basketball, this is by no means a sports film. Rather, Kwibuka, Remember seeks to memorialise the lingering psychic wounds felt by Rwandans decades after 1994’s violent atrocities. This low-key drama should enjoy more festival appearances, but theatrical prospects may be modest.

Lia (Rolland), a standout on a Belgian basketball team, is recruited to play for Rwanda’s national club which will compete in the African Cup being held in Rwanda. She agrees to join Rwanda’s team, despite having misgivings about being back in the county where she grew up; she was sent to live with family in France when she was 9, to avoid the 1994 genocide. Arriving in Kibeho, her small hometown, Lia reunites with her estranged father Christian (Jean Hugues Anglade), which brings back painful memories of the deaths of her mother Kelia and brother Daniel, who perished during the violence. But Lia receives a shock when she discovers that there is no record of her brother’s death, inspiring her to uncover what may have happened to him.

Although not expressed explicitly, Lia appears to be at the tailend of a successful career, and so this trip home is bittersweet in several regards – including the fact that she may soon need to walk away from basketball. Rolland’s gentle performance stays grounded, presenting us with a stoic character who feels like a foreigner in her homeland. Lia no longer remembers the Bantu language of Kinyarwanda, and her Rwandan teammates are noticeably younger than her. Rolland captures that sense of dislocation, which is only exacerbated once Lia begins her quest to find Daniel.

The Kinyarwanda word Kwibuka means “to remember,” and in Rwanda Kwibuka is a period of mourning for the approximately one million locals who died in the 1994 killings. Appropriately, Kwibuka, Remember means to serve as a cinematic record of that ongoing grief, thrusting Lia into the lingering sorrow experienced by survivors and the families of the dead. Initially, she is furious at Christian for not telling her that perhaps Daniel had not died in the same massacre that claimed her mother.

He reluctantly agrees to accompany Lia on her investigation, which will expose the misinformation and complicity that went on during the Rwandan Civil War — and continued long after the fighting stopped. By focusing on one family’s disturbing secrets, D’Adesky wants to tell a larger story about how hard it can be for Rwandans to put their past behind them.

This inherently affecting material is not always well-served by D’Adesky’s subdued style. Credit Kwibuka, Remember for avoiding histrionics — there are no sweeping soliloquies — but in their place is a dry restraint that doesn’t allow for deeper emotional insights. Lia forges a tentative bond with a sensitive local dancer, Alexis (Parfait Ntambiyindekwe Mugiraneza), that flirts with something more romantic, but the lack of narrative follow-through comes across as underdeveloped rather than carefully modulated. Other plot strands also go slack. Lia has come to Rwanda for basketball, but her gradual decision to abandon her cherished career — a choice impacted by a wrist injury — seems oddly anticlimactic.

Clearly, Kwibuka, Remember wants to place the story’s growing emphasis on Lia’s fraught journey to learn the truth about her brother. D’Adesky drapes the proceedings in a funereal tone intended to honour the horrors of the 1994 genocide, but such starchness drains his protagonist’s search of the catharsis it deserves. Not helping matters is a strained third-act twist in which all is revealed about Daniel. D’Adesky and Rolland pay tribute to a tragedy that should never be forgotten, but this dutiful film fails to be sufficiently memorable.