Things of the Aimless Wanderer

This film pushes further Ruhorahoza’s interests in matters of reflexivity regarding representation, this time focusing on the Western gaze upon Africa. Set in Rwanda, Things ruminates on the possibility of a relationship between Africa and the West, haunted by ghosts of the past, ghosts of narratives, trauma, violence and violation, and, indeed of history, dating as far back as the primal scene of the continent’s colonial encounter with explorers. In the process, the filmmaker wonders whether, in this overdetermined context of Western discursive production on Africa, the aporia of the missionary/savage impulse is at all surmountable and, indeed, whether the possibility of pushing and potentially improving one’s society through the gaze of the Other is even imaginable.