Film romance set within the chaos of war (think Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and The English Patient) has always resonated with film audiences drawn in by the fragile human story placed within firing range of inhuman violence.

A Sunday in Kigali (Un dimanche à Kigali), the first in-house production from distrib Equinoxe Films, has similar dramatic ingredients, focusing on an unlikely love affair between Quebecois documentary filmmaker Valcourt (Luc Picard) and Gentille (Senegalese-born Fatou N’Diaye), a waitress at the Hotel Des Milles Collines in the titular city in Rwanda.

While there have already been notable films constructed in and around the genocide of 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis were massacred in 100 days of incomprehensible, well-orchestrated killing – Hotel Rwanda, BBC Films’ Shooting Dogs and HBO’s Sometimes in April – K­­igali has the unusual advantage of veracity. Produced by Lyse Lafontaine and adapted by director Robert Favreau (Les Muses orphelines) from the critically acclaimed French-language novel by Quebec journalist Gil Courtemanche, A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali, the production shot exclusively in Rwanda this past March, using or adapting existing locations – including 14 days at the actual Milles Collines hotel.

‘We were going to shoot some exteriors over there and then come to Montreal to shoot the interiors,’ recalls Montreal-based director of photography Pierre Mignot, who in addition to lensing the recent smash C.R.A.Z.Y., has made eight films with Robert Altman. ‘But finally the production decision was to shoot everything [in Rwanda] – which I think was a good idea.’

Director Favreau is quick to point out that he felt safer in Rwanda than Mexico or L.A. ‘There’s no obvious ethnic tension like you’d think there’d be,’ he says. ‘A strong government is trying to eradicate that. People don’t want more war and genocide. They suffered so much.’

The screen adaptation is somewhat faithful to Courtemanche’s novel, retaining the love story framed around the massacre, but it’s structured with a dual narrative. The film opens with Valcourt returning to the war-ravaged city days after the end of the genocide in search of Gentille, and doubles back into the past through flashbacks, which make up three-quarters of the film. Valcourt uses a camera both to document what he sees and to film an AIDS documentary within the flashback.

During the shoot, Picard was given a Hi8 Caméscope as a prop camera, while Mignot used a Panasonic AG-DVX100A in 24p mode to capture Valcourt’s actual footage. Mignot transferred the post-genocide footage to 2K in order to achieve the look he wanted during the digital intermediate process at Vision Globale in Montreal.

Post-war gloom

‘We’ll give this part a little bit more of a depressive look because everything is post-war,’ he says. ‘The hotel was all in pieces, so this section will be cold. We tried to keep all the colors flat, grey and desaturated; however, there will always be a red or a yellow somewhere in the frame.’

In preparation for the first Quebecois film to be made entirely out of province, Favreau did a location scout and came back with hundreds of photographs.

‘You feel the life of the characters just by looking at the walls where they live,’ says Favreau. ‘Those houses [in Kigali] are so small that it demanded a very particular way of shooting the scenes. We decided to make almost 50% of the film handheld, because there was no space for dolly and tracks. We also felt that, for all the roadblocks, it was a way we could give the audience a real sense of what was happening in those situations, like it was a newsreel.’

Mignot did a tech scout of his own to determine what he’d need for the shoot. ‘There’s no equipment at all over there. There’s nothing,’ he says. ‘We imported and brought everything with us. The only thing we got from Kenya was the generator.’

It took five weeks to get the equipment from Montreal to Kigali. The lighting package had to be lean enough to accommodate a location move every day, which didn’t allow room for a crane and meant a single 20K to handle night exteriors.

‘That was the biggest light – which is okay – but sometimes to shoot in the streets I would have appreciated a little more,’ says Mignot.

Favreau jokes that ‘Kigali is a very expensive movie with a low budget, made with the same kind of ambition to make Mission: Impossible, but with $7 million Canadian.’

He and Mignot storyboarded the entire film and didn’t leave much to chance before heading to Rwanda for the 38-day shoot.

‘Because the situation of shooting a film there was so precarious, the only way we could make sure we got what we needed was to be as prepared as we could,’ explains Favreau.

Despite their advance work, they couldn’t avoid the random power outages that occur daily without notice throughout the city.

‘The production manager had to pay the town – like Ontario or Quebec Hydro – to light a whole street,’ recalls Mignot.

The affluent neighborhoods where the consulates are located were the only streets to have electricity all the time. In fact, the only 35mm projector in town was at the French Embassy, where Mignot got to see the dailies from the first day of production.

‘Usually we saw dailies more than a week after [on Beta SP], by the time the film went from Kigali to Nairobi to Kenya to Amsterdam to Montreal,’ he explains. ‘Then they had to process it [at Deluxe in Toronto]. And then back to Kigali.’

The unreliable power source meant they always had to have their generator handy, which Mignot saw as somewhat of a blessing. ‘I made my own lighting most of the time with the amount of light I had,’ he says.

His lighting approach reflected both the story and the inherent restrictions in shooting on location.

‘I used a lot of HMIs outside, and inside just a few Kino Flos – but mainly Fresnel light. I did a little bit of bounce lighting, but for all the inside and even the outside night exteriors I had to shape Fatou [Gentille] with the Fresnels.’

Mignot’s biggest concern was how to light two actors with very different skin tones. He did tests in Montreal with one of the supporting actresses using a white actor in the same frame.

Coincidentally, he would apply the same methods on Kigali that he’d used on Streamers for Altman (starring Matthew Modine and Michael Wright).

‘Michael is black, black, black and Modine is very white,’ notes Mignot. ‘I learned that, when possible, I should try to backlight the black character. That was my strategy, and it worked quite well to separate them from the background and give them shape.’

The scene he’s most proud of involved Valcourt and Gentille in almost impossible lighting conditions.

‘It was an exterior scene with no light around at all,’ he says. ‘The location had no electricity and it was a night shoot. And there was nothing behind. It was like a black hole. The two characters – Gentille who is black and Valcourt who is very white – were walking along the houses.’ His solution? ‘I traveled a few handheld lights with them, two people carrying them. And both of them were moving just to make believe there were some street lights.’

A Sunday in Kigali is set for an April 12 release in Quebec, while an English-Canadian date is dependent on a March decision from the Cannes Film Festival. Meanwhile, Mignot is in prep for a follow-up to Les Vrais perdantes, a doc about precocious kids pushed by their parents he made with director André Mélançon almost 30 years ago.

Tech breakdown

Aspect ratio: 1:85:1

Camera: Moviecam Compact

Lenses: Cooke and Angenieux 25-250 mm, zoom lens

Stock: Kodak Vision 5274 200T, 5279 500T, 5245

Supplementary camera: Panasonic AG-DVX100A *