The documentary 'Hate Songs', about the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda, invites reflection on the representation of ethnocides in cinema. 30 years have passed since those massacres, which occurred between April 7 and July 15, 1994; in a cinematographic moment in which after the success of a work as relevant as 'The Zone of Interest,' artistic, political, and moral ideas are once again developed about the representation of genocides.
Just seven seconds of the documentary show the corpses lying in the streets after being murdered. The first thing that catches your attention is the almost total absence of images of the massacres. Just a few days of global nervousness due to the situation in the Middle East; and after January 26, the Court of Justice in The Hague considered it "plausible" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, after declaring itself competent to investigate the accusation presented by South Africa and asking the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt the necessary measures to prevent the commission of a genocide against the population of the Strip. The Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis has been represented actively and passively with explicitness and subtlety, with brutality and with poetry. Dozens of filmmakers have contributed their vision to an artistic and social debate that bifurcates between ethics and aesthetics. The Cambodian genocide, caused between 1975 and 1979 by the Maoist regime of the Khmer Rouge in the Asian country against its own people, has two masterpieces by Rithy Panh. And Steven Spielberg, despite the general prestige of Schindler's List, was criticized by certain specialists because of the aestheticism of the little red coat in the middle of the black and white, and for his trick with the showers and gas chambers in his most controversial sequence. In a review that went down in the annals, Jacques Rivette had already been destroyed by Gillo Pontecorvo because of an “abject” mistimed shot.