I have super news to share!
Starting Wednesday, I will be on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival for l’Oeil d’or, the new documentary prize started by the Scam last year. I will be joining Gianfranco Rosi, director of Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), who just won the Golden Bear in Berlin and will preside, Thierry Garrel who made possible so many films during his 20-year tenure at ARTE, Brazilian film critic Amir Labaki, and award-winning actress Natasha Régnier.

A full year behind, and another one ahead…
Dear Friends,
As the new year is starting, in addition to wishing you a wonderful 2014, I wanted to give you a quick digest of what’s coming ahead and of what has happened in the last few months…
First, for the news that’s right around the corner: I am off to India very soon for a nine-month Fulbright Fellowship! I’ll be based in Kolkata and traveling regularly to the Northeast of the country to research my next film.

Dear Friends,
I’m thrilled to announce that all of my films, including MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER, The GACACA Trilogy, and ICE PEOPLE are now available for the home market, on my newly launched, completely revamped website, www.anneaghionfilms.com! The films are available for rental in streaming VOD worldwide…

The Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA)—the organization charged with preserving and providing access to France’s audiovisual history—has acquired a unique collection of footage shot between 2001 and 2009 by French-American documentarian Anne Aghion, during the production of her series of award-winning TV and feature films on post-genocide Rwanda.

Between Sandy and the elections, I know this is a crazy time… I got away with just no power for a few days. My thoughts go to all of you who weren’t as lucky. I just wanted to tell you I am off to California for the rest of the week. For those of you in the San Francisco/Bay Area, it is my honor to have been invited to deliver the keynote address at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Conscience, organized by Stanford University’s Europe Center.

Dear Supporters,
We recently shipped out the DVD boxset of the Gacaca Trilogy – the last of our Kickstarter rewards! So a little over a year after you joined Assumpta Mugiraneza and me on the establishment of IRIBA Center, I wanted to give you a brief status update.

Greetings from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como where I am spending the month working on my next project. Check out the talk I did at TEDxESCP in Paris speaking about my work as a documentary filmmaker. View it it here and share at will!

Dear friends,
With the New Year, come new ideas and projects, and a flurry of updates.
This fall, I had the enormous privilege of spending a month as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. This was a fabulous opportunity to reflect and gather thoughts and energy for my new projects. It’s still a bit early to say more, but I am working on two projects that both involve trauma and our interaction with landscape.
I had the honor of being featured in the Fall issue of the Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah to talk about my work in Rwanda. Published by the Shoah Memorial in Paris, this issue, which also included a discussion with SHOAH director Claude Lanzmann, was devoted to film and the Holocaust.

Dear Friends and Supporters,
We made it! Wow! You all carried us through the finish line of our Kickstarter campaign for the IRIBA Center and helped us reach our $40,000 goal!!! Three days early!!! We are proud and exhilarated by your support! It’s fabulous!
What is even more heart-warming is that new pledgers are still joining us and contributing so that IRIBA Center can go even further. We have reached 273 backers. Together you have contributed $42,671.

Dear Friends and Supporters,
It’s been less than a week since we launched our kickstarter fundraising campaign for IRIBA CENTER for Multimedia Heritage in Rwanda, and things are going well! We have already reached more than 20% of our $40,000 goal!I thought I’d share with you the story of the incredible trip to Cambodia that inspired this undertaking.

Summer is here with the launch of a new www.gacacafilms.com website, and a fundraising campaign on KICKSTARTER to create IRIBA CENTER FOR MULTIMEDIA HERITAGE in Rwanda!

IRIBA CENTER, whose name means “the source” in Kinyarwanda, will gather over a century of the country’s audiovisual history from sources in Africa and Europe, and make it free and accessible to the public.

On December 28, the PBS NOVA show, Secrets Beneath the Ice, will feature almost a minute of ICE PEOPLE footage. I decided to seize this occasion to revamp www.icepeople.com. The website is still a work in progress, but I hope you’ll agree that it’s on its way to looking gorgeous.
We’ve also made some headway and are making DVD’s of ICE PEOPLE available on AMAZON and NETFLIX. We’re working to get the film streaming on I-TUNES, Netflix and Amazon VOD.

I arrived in France directly from Los Angeles in mid-May and took a train south to attend a screening of MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER in Dieulefit, a small town of 3000 in the Drôme, organized by Intore za Dieulefit, a local association whose main mission is to support Bisesero in Rwanda by giving cows to the community. The event which was extremely well advertised (see photo below) drew a larger crowd than the LA screening earlier that same week. Since the beginning of the year, along with Assumpta Mugiraneza, we have been working to develop a countrywide screening series in Rwanda.

The New York Times calls MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER a “restrained and ethically nuanced documentary.” This NYT review ran during MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER’s run at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem this January. You can read the full movie review here. A new year brings new audiences and exposure to MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER.

Read all about Anne’s projects on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times Arts Section.
Rwandans Judging Genocide, Their Way
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: June 19, 2009
The documentary filmmaker Anne Aghion asks a lot of tough questions in “My Neighbor, My Killer,” the fourth and last in her series of films about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

I’m just back from the Cannes Film Festival. I am thrilled to announce that MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER will screen as part of the Sterling US Feature Competition at Silverdocs in Washington DC on June 16 @ 3pm & June 19 @ 11:30am.