Trees Of Peace Student Notes PDF

Page 1 of 2 TREES OF PEACE Directed by Alanna Brown In a Rwanda marred with violence, death, and destruction, four women seek shelter in a storage basement under a kitchen and are forced to wage a war for life. Alanna Brown’s debut nudges the audience to seek hope an...

Page 1 of 2 TREES OF PEACE Directed by Alanna Brown In a Rwanda marred with violence, death, and destruction, four women seek shelter in a storage basement under a kitchen and are forced to wage a war for life. Alanna Brown’s debut nudges the audience to seek hope and hang on to the ropes of resilience like how Annick (Eliane Umuhire), Jeanette (Charmaine Bingwa), Peyton (Ella Cannon) and Mutesi (Bola Koleosho) did when faced with genocide. The Rwandan Genocide (1994) During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, also known as 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbours. By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and 2 million refugees (mainly Hutus) fled Rwanda, exacerbating what had already become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.  Page 2 of 2 Themes to consider:  Greif  Hope  Unity of women  Courage  Post-colonial impact  Prejudice Review: Trees of Peace Harrowingly Explores Hope and Survival. Movies about genocide can range from disturbing cinematic masterpieces to truculent sentimental exploitation. It’s a fine line wherein an artist is exploring the horrors of humanity committing unthinkable and unspeakable acts while also trying to make, to some extent, a gorgeous movie that manipulates and moves us. I mention this because I found myself holding my breath throughout the breadth of Tress of Peace. Both because of the film and the nagging fear that it would reveal itself as Christian propaganda or slip into sanctimonious sermonizing. Alanna Brown’s Trees of Peace avoids easy answers while also wrestling with a fundamental question: How does one keep their humanity when all around them all they see is inhumanity? Brown’s film explores how four women hid in a fruit cellar during the Rwandan genocide while never succumbing to cheap theatrics. Trees of Peace spends most of its time in a small cellar beneath a house, barely big enough for the four women to stand on their knees. Brown uses Michael Rizzi’s camera in several ways, from stylishly overt to subtle frame compositions and blocking. Additionally, the four women, Annick (Eliane Umuhire), Jeanette (Charmaine Bingwa), Mutesi (Bola Koleosho), and a white American woman named Peyton (Ella Cannon), are the only characters we ever fully see. Annick is Hutu, while Mutesi and Jeanette are Tutsi; Peyton is at first a typical white American college girl trying to find herself in a “far off foreign land.” But the four are united in their struggle to survive what turns out to be a months-long hellscape: 81 days. For those who do not know, the Rwandan genocide was an instance that saw over a million Tutsi people murdered by the Hutus, often with machetes. It is a violent and horrific chapter not just in Rwanda’s history but global history, as the rest of the world stood by and  Page 3 of 2 watched. Moreover, it is a sobering reminder that colonialism’s roots have long-ranging consequences. Brown doesn’t hold your hand, so some knowledge beforehand would be required, but she also frames the incidents so that all you need to know is that they happened. While it could be adapted into a play, Brown, who also wrote the script, is cinematic. She utilizes Rizzi’s lens to frame scenes in such a way as to make us feel the isolation and desperation. Yet, she is never exploitative in her approach to the bloodshed and horrific violence the characters witness outside the tiny cellar window. Like Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, there is an unease in how we are unsure of the lay of the land. As opposed to omitting any establishing shots such as The Passion of Joan of Arc, we are never shown much of Annika’s house or outside. Instead, Brown keeps us confined to the cellar and our world, like the four women, is so tiny as to be discombobulating. We enter the cellar, and at times Rizzi movies his camera around, but the layout is something we are never quite sure of. We only know it is cramped; Brown and Rizzi make the claustrophobia visceral. The women do not start as friends, but as strangers. The fact that they do not know each other merely adds another layer of discomfort to a film dedicated to exploring how fractured we as individuals can be in times of crisis. The only man we see is Annick’s husband, Francois (Tongayi Christa). He returns every so often to bring food. The women have huddled alone, forced to acknowledge, and understand each other. Mutesi, a Tutsi, is suspicious of Annick and her husband. Though they claim to be Hutu moderates, the horrors outside their window suggest that “moderate” holds little comfort to the Tutsis. Jeannette is a nun who soon realizes her faith rests on pious slogans and trite sentiments. Her belief is fascinating, for it evolves as the movie goes along. Brown allows Jeanette mercy, something the character does not grant to herself or even her own mother. By the end, she has become a kinder, more merciful woman to others but, more importantly, to herself. Brown does not use the Rwanda massacre as a backdrop but as a lens to look at the basic prejudices and beliefs we all hold. The Catholic woman who preaches to others never to judge suddenly finds herself judging Peyton when she discovers she tried to kill herself. The look on Peyton’s face as she stares in disbelief that Jeanette could sit amid genocide and tell someone that the greatest sin is taking one’s life is a sublime moment on Brown’s part. There is no scene following about the hypocrisies of religion. Instead, Brown leaves it to us to mull over. The women struggle to survive both the situation and their inner turmoil. Atrocities strip away our humanity, so we must fight to save what little of it that survives.  Page 4 of 2 That is what makes Trees of Peace so breath taking. It looks at the message of love and forgiveness without ever giving in to saccharine-sweet melodramatic sentimentality, despite the title and main message being based on a children’s book. However, Trees of Peace never infantilizes the women. They are complicated characters with conflicting ideas that they try to reconcile within themselves. The world is falling apart, and they are trying their best not to do the same. Brown’s dialogue is a gift to the actors. At times it becomes a sort of poetic prose. In a letter to her unborn son, Annika writes of Jeanette, “She is a woman who claims her anger like her name.” Throughout their time in the cellar, the women will have to confront not just the crumbling of their very notion of civilization but themselves. For it is here that Brown understands that if we are to have mercy for others, we must first have it for ourselves. Righteous anger is a fire that drives us, but if we are not careful, it can consume us. As a result, these women have suffered trauma in one form or another. Peyton’s confession unveils the complexity of the trauma uniting the women. She killed her little brother while driving drunk, exiling herself from her family, and tried to kill herself before running to Rwanda to try and lose herself. The pious Jeanette did nothing to stop her father from raping her mother. Just as the furious, Mutisi cannot forgive the villagers and her family who stood idly by while her uncle raped her. Annika has suffered her own trauma, four miscarriages, and worries that her current pregnancy could go the same way while also carrying the burden of not doing enough to battle her fellow Hutu’s belief in supremacy. Brown shrewdly shows how unimaginable tragedy can wear away at our basic human decency, creating a scarcity of kindness. On one occasion, Francois tells Annika he must leave; he has other supplies he must deliver. Annika is stunned; there’s more food, but not for them. Francois is helping others in hiding, and while the women understand this, it means less to them. They cry out for Francois to return before he closes the cellar door. It is easy to call them selfish, but Brown makes us understand that we are only humans, even those we deem tremendous and heroic, who survive atrocities like the Rwandan genocide. The four actors are so generous with each other’s performances that it is hard to say one performance is better than another. They work in concert, creating believable moments of anger, sadness, and collective understanding. It could not have been an easy movie to film, as the women portrayed are real, to say nothing of what it must do to a person to act in a film that takes place in a genocide. Bingwa’s Jeanette, however, for me, is a fascinating character. Perhaps my own struggles with my faith draw me to her. I only know that I found her performance touching. In particular, the way she would tighten her lip, an attempt to hold back the screams of anguish at the unravelling world around her. Brown embraces the surreal. After all, what could be more surreal than witnessing the destruction of everyday life? Annick has a dream  Page 5 of 2 where her water breaks, forcing her into labour while the other women try to silence her. It is a dream sequence but plays out like an out-of-body experience mixed with a nightmare. Trees of Peace constantly remind us of how many days have passed so that we can understand how time seems to stand still when nothing changes. At one point, Francois says he will be back in a day, and we wait with agonizing anticipation as two days pass. Trees of Peace delves into its story without any setup. Like the four women, we are plunged into uncertainty and self-imposed hiding. Brown doesn’t make Trees of Peace easy to watch, nor does she make it impossible for non-fil fans to appreciate. She is not interested in easily digestible answers and pithy sermons. Instead, Brown and Rizzi’s camera shows us the inner turmoil of four women facing a horror they’ve never dreamed of and never once creates unnecessary drama or manufactures conflict to satisfy a story beat. It’s that grit of humanity that gives Trees of Peace its searing quality. [Source: https://www.thefandomentals.com/trees-of-peace-review/] Cinematography in tight spaces- from the cinematographers: This film was challenging in so many ways. Like many productions, we built the set on a stage. We didn’t have the benefit of creating our shot lists based on a practical location that we could walk around in and visualize. But unlike many productions, nearly the entire film takes place in one small 5’x5’ room which we affectionately called “the box”. There aren’t many other films we could use as a direct reference but one film that we pointed to a lot was “BURIED” with Ryan Reynolds. It’s a completely different genre and story but it was all told from the point of view of the character who was buried alive in a coffin, and it was done to great effect. We found some helpful information about how to approach telling a story set primarily in one room. One trick I picked up from watching a behind the scenes video of BURIED was how they used miniatures of the coffin and Ryan’s character to pre-vis shots. On our first shot listing meeting I presented Alanna with a clear acrylic cube big enough to hold a basketball and four different Barbie dolls to represent the box and our actors respectively. This was our miniature set, “The Barbie Box” and it proved to be very helpful to visualize how we wanted to block our actors and cover scenes. A huge challenge for us was keeping the film visually interesting and fresh from scene to scene while also keeping it grounded and not feeling too gimmicky. Alanna and I decided early on that we couldn’t block and cover each scene the same way otherwise we felt the audience would get bored very quickly. Alanna came to the table with a lot of great ideas and references for each scene and we tried to incorporate them into our approach. We also focused on creating purposeful visual transitions. I knew we could always cut to black between scenes but a well thought out transition to me is always a more elegant way to keep the flow of a film moving. One idea that Alanna was very adamant about keeping was to only tell the story from the point of view of these four women. There’s a shot in the very beginning where the camera  Page 6 of 2 follows one character down through a hatch in the floor, into the box and the hatch closes above her. From that moment forward we almost never leave the room, and the camera essentially becomes another character inside the box only seeing and hearing what these characters are experiencing. The goal was to create a sense of claustrophobia and constant uneasiness from not knowing what’s happening around them. Also, it kept the story macro focused on these women and their story within the broader context of the war. [Source: https://blog.sigmaphoto.com/2022/cinematography-in-tight-spaces-trees-of-peace/] ‘Trees Of Peace’ Ending, Explained – Were The Four Women Saved? What Does The Film’s Title Symbolize? Credits: Netflix In “Trees of Peace,” directed by Alanna Brown, four women with different personal histories spend 81 days together in a basement during the Rwanda genocide. The 1994 genocide was against the Tutsi minority, where the Hutus attacked not just the Tutsis but also the Hutu and Twa moderates. Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches by the Hutus who wanted complete dominance in Rwanda. Women were rampantly raped and murdered in broad daylight. For around a hundred days, the savagery continued. The whole world received news of the thousands who were losing their lives, yet no country interfered.  Page 7 of 2 ‘Trees Of Peace’ Plot Summary: What Is The Film About? Beneath the sunlit house with bright walls was a dark basement, originally created to store food, but was now inhabited by four women. Out of the four, three were saved by Hutu moderates, while one was a Hutu moderate herself. Annick was pregnant with a boy, and her husband, Francois, asked his wife to stay safe in the basement while he went away in search of food and help. Annick had always treated every person equally, and for that, she now has to pay the price. Francois was a school teacher who taught both Hutus and Tutsis. Since they refused to follow the extremist path, their names were listed on the list of people to be executed in Rwanda. Mutesi, a Tutsi woman who lived in the basement with the rest, could not accept the fact that a Hutu woman was staying with them. After witnessing Hutu men with machetes slaughtering Tutsis, she feared sharing the room with Annick. Annick explained how her life was equally in danger since she and her husband helped the Tutsis. Mutesi was bold with her words. She feared the boy Annick was bringing into the world, knowing how Hutu men were turning into bloodthirsty savages. Annick was forgiving; she knew Mutesi had a reason for her hateful words. She explained that she had had four miscarriages in the past. She knew what pain was when four babies died inside her own body. She had loved her husband since childhood, and their baby boy was their ray of hope and reason to survive. Accompanying them was a Christian nun, Jeanette, who preached the lessons of forgiveness. She firmly believed in God and how He would show her the right path. Even after watching and listening to a gruesome act, she refused to judge the man. She believed it is only God who can judge a man. But as time passed by, she started to question herself, who she was, and why she had become a nun. Her beliefs and hope started to fall apart with time. She believed in prayers, but she also accepted that she was just like the rest, hoping to survive the test of time. The fourth one living in the basement was Peyton. An American girl who had come to Rwanda to teach and was a part of the Peace Projects. While the rest looked down upon her white privilege, with time, they learned that even though she was White, her life was far from perfect. She showed the camaraderie and refused to leave the basement until the rest could also be saved from the danger that loomed. How Did The Four Women Bond? They were locked inside a box with barely enough space for two to sleep while the other two waited for their turn. Annick believed Francois would come within a day or two. They had hoped that the UN would interfere and stop the massacre. While they waited for help from outside, the women wanted to use the restroom. Annick informed them that the basement room had a lock on the outside and, therefore, could only be opened from the outside. Mutesi panicked after learning this fact. She feared that they would be stuck there forever. The women held on to their needs, but it was getting difficult to control with time. Peyton found a solution. She noticed how a wooden slab in the base was loose, and beneath  Page 8 of 2 it, there was a small hole. Peyton and Mutesi pulled the slab off the ground with all their strength, and that spot was used as their makeshift bathroom. One day, they heard screams outside; a woman was being hunted by the Hutu men. Jeanette planned to call her inside the basement, but Annick stopped her. She believed it would be unsafe. Peyton came up with the idea of throwing something at her instead of using her voice to call her. But just at that moment, two men grabbed hold of her. Jeanette was relieved because she knew one of the two men. His name was Pascal. He was a member of her church; the choir boy, whom she believed to be a good Hutu. She was stopped by the rest of them from calling him. Her belief was shattered when the boy she thought to be well raped the woman and slashed open her throat afterward. Mutesi blamed Annick for not saving the woman when they had the chance to. She believed that Peyton could have found help outside and that, instead of her, a Tutsi woman should have been protected. Mutesi harshly added that Francois was probably dead, and that was the reason why he could not return to save them all. Even though they had different beliefs and different upbringings, they were united by their suffering. All four women had traumatic pasts, and that helped them understand each other a little better with time. Annick had to live through four miscarriages. She fought through the tough times just like she had before. Mutesi’s uncle used to rape her when she was young. Every woman around her knew what her uncle did to her, yet they remained quiet. Mutesi started to bond with the rest because she did not wish to be like those quiet women who did nothing to end the suffering of another woman. Jeanette’s father used to rape and torture her mother, and that forced her mother to commit suicide. Her father was a priest, and she followed in his footsteps to become a nun. She had always considered what her mother did to be the greatest sin, something that her father taught her, but now she questioned the past. Peyton was suicidal. She was driving with her brother one day, which led to his death. She could not forgive herself, and neither could her family. She was always made to feel that she should have been the one to die in that car accident. Jeanette initially judged Peyton for attempting to take her life, but she realized the pain she felt and how much she suffered to feel that way. Even though Peyton had always wanted to die, she could not make herself do it. When the days were getting tough with food shortages and no ray of hope, Peyton looked at her hands and declared that she wanted to live, now more than ever. ‘Trees Of Peace’ Ending Explained – How Were The Four Women Saved? What Does The Title Of The Film Symbolize? Peyton carried a few food items and a book titled “Seeds of Love, Trees of Peace” by Susan Elijah Kern. Annick wanted to read the book, but she hadn’t read English for ten years. Then, Peyton read it for her. All the women listened closely to the tale of how seeds of love were spread all across the world, a ray of hope in their trying times. As they started to listen to  Page 9 of 2 Peyton read the tale of hope and love, Francois came to them with food; it was almost a divine coincidence. Francois managed to survive, but he could not easily come home since there were road blockades all around. He promised to come back again for his wife and his child. The women read the book over and over again. Annick attempted to read again after years, and Peyton helped her learn the language better. The wall of the room was now covered in words. They wrote their names, they wrote their dreams, and they wrote about what they were going through. Annick named her unborn child Elijah, inspired by the author’s name. Elijah’s name was added to the list of those who lived in the room. Annick wrote letters to her child, every experience, every feeling, about the women who accompanied her and the challenging times they were living in. Francois visited them at intervals and provided them with food; however, the gaps started to increase, and the women fed on rotten food. They were losing their strength; their bodies had become weak and their bones fragile. Annick’s son had stopped kicking, and she started to assume that he was losing his heartbeat. They were losing hope, they huddled together and spent the days. On the 77th day, Francois came with food and good news. He informed them that the rebel army was gaining control and that the roadblocks were now mostly abandoned. He asked them to wait for a day, and he would return to take them to the Hotel des Mille Collines. They waited the night, hoping to be saved the next day, but they heard vehicles approaching. The Hutu men questioned the neighbor, Peter, about Francois. When he refused to answer, he was asked to kill Tutsi children. Peter tried to do what they asked of him, but he gave up and disclosed where Francois was hiding. He, along with the children, was immediately shot dead. Annick gave up. Without her husband, she lost her will to fight for her survival. Mutesi was playing with a fruit cutter when it occurred to her that they could use it to create a gap and push open the lid of the room. All of them together pushed with all their strength. Annick initially did not join them, but when her baby kicked again, she regained her power. She had to survive for the child, and she joined them, and they finally opened the door. They climbed up one after the other and were relieved to feel the sun on their skin again. Though right after they heard a vehicle approach, they thought it was the Hutu men who came back looking for Annick, but as it turned out, it was the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) along with Francois. They had come to transfer the women to a safe place. Francois explained that the Hutu men had killed everyone at the school he was hiding at, but he had been away during that time as he had gone to bury a little girl who had passed away. The girl’s spirit saved his life, and he was reunited with his wife and son. “Trees of Peace,” at the end, discusses how, after the genocide, women took charge and led a movement for healing, peace, and forgiveness. As a result of those women who took charge today, Rwanda now has the highest percentage of women appointed to the government of any nation. Thousands of victims forgave their perpetrators due to the Gacaca initiative. The victims are now trying to find peace with their neighbors. “Trees of Peace” is an impactful indie film that hits all the right notes. Even though the characters were trapped in that small space, they managed to grow together. They learned to see beyond their prejudices and found a stark resemblance. They were all marked with guilt,  Page 10 of 2 shame, and violation. In that small space, they learned to forgive each other and themselves, a virtue that later resonated in the entire country. Source: https://dmtalkies.com/trees-of-peace-summary-ending-explained-2022-film-alanna-brown/ TREES OF PEACE (2022): HISTORY V HOLLYWOOD By Kevin Lang | Published May 26, 2022 Is Trees of Peace based on a true story? Not exactly. According to writer and director Alanna Brown, her Netflix movie was inspired by various stories of women in hiding in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide. Brown said that the idea for the movie came to her in 2008 or so while she was conducting research for an interview with Francine Lefrak, the founder of Same Sky, a trade-not-aid organization  Page 11 of 2 dedicated to helping rehabilitate women survivors in both Rwanda and other international locations. "In prepping to interview her, I started coming across real survival stories of women and just people in general," Brown said, "and was so gripped by the will to survive such a harrowing ordeal, without food, without water, sometimes without shelter, hiding in the most extreme circumstances you could possibly imagine and hanging on to life." While a number of real survival stories inspired her, which contribute to the film's assertion that it was "inspired by true events," the story told in the movie is fictional and not directly based on any single real- life account. -Peoria Film Fest Interview  Page 12 of 2 "I decided to [set] the story in one spot because I had read other stories of women who were hiding in one place, and it was very compelling to me," says Brown, "I was drawn to the challenge of sort of having to think outside the box while setting a story literally in a box." Alanna Brown said that she also decided to confine the story to a single room because she was shooting on such a low budget. -SBIFF Interview Just one of the similar real-life stories to the one Brown created for the movie is that of Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Rwandan woman who spent 91 days in hiding with seven other women in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor. Ilibagiza's family was brutally murdered  Page 13 of 2 during the genocide. She wrote the book Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, which documents her true story of survival. Director Alanna Brown said that what also inspired her is that since the genocide ended and they rebuilt the country, Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in government of any country in the world, going from 18% participation before the genocide to 56% in 2008. The four characters huddle together in hiding in a storage space beneath a kitchen floor in the movie. Are the four women in Trees of Peace based on real people? No. While writer and director Alanna Brown says that she was inspired by real-life accounts of women in hiding, the four women in the movie, two Tutsis, a Hutu, and an American volunteer, are fictional characters created to represent the varying backgrounds of some of the women who were affected by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  Page 14 of 2 "The script was written to reflect the true events of the Rwandan genocide—and to reflect the collective spirit within all of us," Brown stated on her Kickstarter page for the film. "Whether we've seen death or not, live in Rwanda or otherwise, many of the hopes, fears, losses, and triumphs in this story are universal. Annick, Mutesi, Jeanette, and Peyton—with all their vices and virtues—will shine as real women, and as warriors." In the movie, the women are at first at odds with one another but gradually form a sisterhood during their 81 days in hiding. The descriptions were sourced from Alanna Brown's "Trees of Peace" Kickstarter page. How many people died in the Rwandan genocide? In researching the question, "Is Trees of Peace a true story?" we confirmed that as many as 800,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide, which was started by Hutu  Page 15 of 2 nationalists and carried out mainly against their ethnic counterparts, the Tutsi. The genocide spanned approximately 100 days from April 7, 1994 to July 15, 1994. It ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country via a military offensive. The four women in the Netflix Rwandan genocide movie remain in hiding for 81 days during the bloodshed. Where can I buy the children's book featured in Trees of Peace? In the Trees of Peace Netflix movie, the four women find inspiration while they are in hiding by reading from a children's poem book titled Seeds of Love, Trees of Peace. The book was written exclusively for the movie and is not available to the public. The only way to previously obtain a copy was to make a higher-tiered pledge to the movie's Kickstarter campaign. It's worth noting that if you look on Amazon, this is not the same book as Wangari's Trees of Peace by Jeanette Winter about the Kenyan environmentalist and political activist Wangari Maathai.  Page 16 of 2 Was Trees of Peace funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign? In addition to eventually finding producers to back the film, director Alanna Brown ran her own Kickstarter campaign and managed it herself. She acquired 372 backers who pledged a total of $65,752. The total budget ended up being around $800,000. Where was Trees of Peace shot? Director Alanna Brown shot the movie in 20 days in Los Angeles. The Rwandan genocide movie was shot chronologically in part so that the graffiti on the walls of the small storage room that hid the women could grow realistically during the filming. It also allowed for the characters to lose weight as the shooting progressed, reflecting their lack of food during their 81-day confinement. This is a photo of the set constructed for the concept trailer. While it gives you an idea of the shooting space, another more detailed set was constructed for the filming. Photo: Trees of Peace Kickstarter What does the title "Trees of Peace" mean? While attempting to unearth the Trees of Peace true story, we learned that the origin of the title comes from the command, "Cut the tall trees," which was broadcast over the radio in Rwanda in 1994 to signal the start of the war/genocide. The "tall trees" were the Tutsi, who were ethnically taller and had lighter skin than the Hutu, the ethnic majority. The radio  Page 17 of 2 broadcast literally meant that it was time to kill the Tutsi. In the movie's title, the four characters are the "trees," two of whom are Tutsi. Their strength and the sisterhood that they form is representative of what helped many of the women survive and the country heal. Did writer/director Alanna Brown visit Rwanda prior to making Trees of Peace? Yes. Alanna Brown visited Rwanda in 2019 before shooting the film to talk to locals and to make contacts in the Rwandan film community. Through those contacts, she was able to cast Rwandan actor Eliane Umuhire who plays Annick. Brown's goal was to create a story that reflected the strength and resilience of the women survivors in Rwanda. While Trees of Peace is not directly based on a specific true story, it draws from similar accounts to create a narrative that is representative of those shared real-life experiences. Brown also visited a female survivor of the Rwandan genocide who lived outside of Los Angeles at the time. "She welcomed me to her home and I went and visited her, and she told me her story and I met her children and I met her mother. She read the script and she loved it," says Brown. "She thought it was a beautiful story. So having her sort of blessing was what I needed to feel like I could keep going forward with this." -Holly Hargreaves Interview Top (from left to right): Actresses Bola Koleosho, Ella Cannon, Charmaine Bingwa, and Eliane Umuhire Bottom: Writer/Director Alanna Brown Photo: Alanna Brown Instagram @abrowngirlfilms Source: https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/trees-of-peace/