17:30 for 18:00

To commemorate the 100 days of remembrance of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung invite you to a screening of Après Coup (Afterwards), followed by a live Q&A via Zoom with director Susan Solomon.

Après Coup explores the persistence of trauma among adults who survived genocide as children. It centres on the experiences of orphans of two genocides separated by fifty years – the Holocaust in France and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda – and asks: what might the orphans of these genocides have to say to each other today?

In November 2019, Solomon and Mutarabayire-Schafer brought together three orphans of the 1942 deportation of Jews from France and three orphans of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda for a dialogue at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, arguably the first encounter of its kind. Their conversation was not about genocide itself, but about what came afterwards: growing up without parents, without roots, and the deep loneliness that persists long after the events that shaped their lives. A table in a small room at the Mémorial serves as the film’s focal point – the place from which participants move outward into their daily lives in Paris, and the place to which they return, again and again, to pick up the threads of a conversation that has no easy ending. Without warning, the past pierces the present.

Susan Solomon is a producer and co-director of Après Coup and Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto. Born in Montreal, she attended a school in which half the children came from families partially destroyed in the Holocaust. A historian of medicine, her work focuses on the trauma of child victims of genocide. She co-directed the documentary In Search of Roubakine, shown at the Solzhenitsyn Festival in 2012.

Amélie Mutarabayire-Schafer is a psychotherapist and co-director of Après Coup who lost the majority of her family in the Genocide against the Tutsi. She is the founder of Subirusuke, an association supporting widows and orphans of genocide, and coordinated psychological support programmes for genocide survivors during the Gacaca trials. She directed Les Dames de la Colline (2014) and co-authored L’Appel de L’Inanga (2023).