In the documentary Earth Made of Glass, director Deborah Scranton weaves together the stories of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Jean Pierre Sagahutu, two men who struggled to seek the truth about what really happened in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. How could thousands of people die every day for three months while the Western world stood silent? At the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, Becky Garrison, author of Jesus Died for This?, sat down with Deborah Scranton (director/producer), Reid Carolin (producer), and Jean Pierre Sagahutu to dicuss how this film can shed light on a story that has gone underreported in the United States.
Becky Garrison: Why do you feel the Rwandan genocide received so little attention in 1994?
Reid Carolin: We had just come off Mogadishu [the "Black Hawk down" incident in October 1993], and that was a colossal disaster for the U.S. Some responsibility should fall on the media for generally misreporting what was actually going on in Rwanda. The real tragedy is to go back there 15 years later and look through all the reports and see what isn't true. The coverage was so poor that this story has not been understood correctly.