MARTIN CHEMHERE writes…Initial fundraising for the Iriba Center for multimedia heritage in Rwanda has just been concluded with a total of $47,201 raised.
Iriba means “the source” in Kinyarwanda. The project aims to 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.
Project director Anne Agheon explains that the target was to raise $40, 000 in an eight-week funding marathon. Another €25,000 (about $35,000) was raised from Oxfam-Novib. Fund raising is continuing as the project requires a total yearly budget of around $400,000.
“Iriba’s main mission is to make accessible documents that may exist elsewhere and that are not available in Rwanda or not accessible to the public. It may transpire that some documents will be unique,’ says Agheon, who has successfully made several films on the Rwandan genocide.
Funding contributions came from US, France, Belgium, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Tasmania, Rwanda and the diaspora. A Rwandan colleague in the project, Assumpta Mugiraneza, received donations from the Bronislav Geremek Foundation in Poland.
Contributors will receive the video of the feature film My Neighbor My Killer (80 minutes), which was in Official Selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and has been shown around the world since then.
