Kantarama Gahigiri

Kantarama Gahigiri is a Rwandan filmmaker (writer/director).
She is an alumna of Realness Residency (2018), La Fabrique Cinéma at Cannes FF (2019), Le Moulin d’Andé (2020), Berlinale Talents (2021) and Locarno Filmmakers Academy (2022).
As of today, Kantarama pursues her passion immersed in an exploration of identity, migration, empowerment and on-screen representation with her recent projects.

Her most recent work: TERRA MATER - mother land, (10 min) short fiction, addresses the ties between colonisation, capitalism and climate change. It talks about land, an issue that is directly linked to the people, their heritage and their future. TERRA MATER premiered at Berlinale (2023) in Shorts Competition, and is selected at Vienna Shorts (2023), Kurzfilm Hamburg, Vila do Conde and other upcoming festivals.
In 2022, Kantarama created another short fiction about eco-responsibility: Mother Earth, (4 min) as a Postcard of the Future for Locarno Film Festival 75th edition (2022). The short film screened on Piazza Grande in front of 8000 spectators, alongside the work of 10 other renowned filmmakers including Claire Simon, Nadav Lapid, Aleksandr Sokurov, and Bertrand Mandico.
In 2019, invited by a residency in Switzerland, Kantarama wrote and directed ETHEREALITY, (15 min), hybrid documentary about migration and the sense of belonging. The film screened in competition at Chicago IFF (2020), Clermont-Ferrand (2020) and Namur IFF (2021). Ethereality won Best Short Documentary Award (Poulain d’Or) at FESPACO 2021 and Expanded Shorts Jury Award (MQ Residency) at this human world film festival in Vienna 2020, features in the curated program Quartiers Lointains Season 6 : Afrofuturistik, played in more than 75 festivals worldwide, and was released in theatres in France (2021), the United States (2021), and three consecutive years in Switzerland (2021-22-23).

Project info