Where others see nothing, Remy Ryumugabe sees more. In ordinary gestures and fleeting, often overlooked moments, he finds cinema, poetry, and meaning.

Remy Ryumugabe is an award-winning Rwandan filmmaker and visual artist whose work moves fluidly between cinema, photography, and installation art. Rooted in introspection and sensory exploration, his practice is driven by a sustained curiosity about memory, identity, grief, and the intimate tensions between body, time, and place. Through experimental forms and narrative hybridity, Ryumugabe crafts works that resist easy interpretation, inviting audiences into contemplative spaces where emotion precedes explanation. Working from Rwanda while engaging global cinematic languages, his practice places African subjectivity in dialogue with experimental and transnational film traditions.

His creative process often begins with observation — fragments of memory, gestures, and sensory impressions — allowing form to emerge intuitively rather than through conventional scripts. His work converses with essay cinema, slow cinema, and African poetic and oral traditions, embracing ambiguity as a generative force rather than something to be resolved.

Travel has become a central method in Ryumugabe’s recent practice, not simply as movement but as a way of seeing. Through a self-imposed challenge to create short films during his journeys outside Rwanda, he uses unfamiliar spaces and encounters as catalysts for reflection and formal experimentation. As he explains, “Travel is an act of observation — of the world beyond and the self within. It is a journey where the familiar and the unknown intersect, shifting perspectives and opening space for introspection.” These travel-inspired works, written and directed by Ryumugabe and developed with co-producers, move fluidly between reality and fiction, extending his ongoing interest in perception, memory, and presence.

Over the years, Ryumugabe’s audiovisual and photographic works have been presented at major international platforms, including Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and Uppsala International Short Film Festival, as well as institutions such as Galerie Imane Farès (Paris), Museum Hilversum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Goethe-Institut Kigali, Indiba Arts Gallery, and the Kigali Center for Photography. His films have traveled widely across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, placing his work in dialogue with artists and filmmakers operating at the edges of contemporary moving-image practice.

His work has received significant international recognition. In 2025, Ryumugabe was selected as a Berlinale Talents alumnus. He has also received the Jury Prize at the 41st Uppsala International Short Film Festival, the Golden Young African Filmmakers’ Award at the 29th Afrika Filmfestival Leuven, Best Experimental Film at the 15th Festival Internacional de Cine Africano de Argentina, and Best Male Director in Short Documentary at the 8th Urusaro International Women Film Festival.

While widely recognized as a director and visual artist, Ryumugabe’s creative footprint extends deeply into film production. As a producer, he has worked on internationally acclaimed projects such as Imuhira, selected at the Locarno Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival, and Minimals in a Titanic World, a feature film produced and premiered in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale. His producing practice mirrors the sensitivity found in his personal work, prioritizing bold authorship and formally adventurous cinema.

His filmography reflects a sustained engagement with interiority and existential reflection. Rather than marking stylistic breaks, his works feel like variations of an ongoing inquiry, each returning to questions of presence, loss, and becoming from different formal angles. Things in the Psyche of an Awake Dreamer (2024) follows a young filmmaker navigating grief, artistic uncertainty, and fleeting intimacy. A Wingless Bird That Flies (2023) and The Murmurings of Ajá (2023) extend this exploration through docufiction and video art, blending poetic narration with fragmented realities. Earlier works such as Each of Her Scars Has a Story (2022), From Here to There (2022), Mnemosyne (2019), and Melpomene (2018) affirm his commitment to cinema as a vessel for memory, mourning, and the quiet weight of lived experience.

Alongside his completed films, Ryumugabe is actively developing feature-length projects that expand his cinematic language. These include Ijambo, a cinematographic essay currently in research and development; Kinema, a feature docufiction in post-production; One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes, a Woman (working title), a feature essay documentary in the early stages of production; and Qui est mon père?, a feature documentary currently in production. Many of these projects have been supported by leading development platforms such as Ouaga Producers Lab, Takmil, Yaoundé Film Lab, and Moulin d’Andé.

Photography occupies an equally vital place in his artistic practice. His ongoing project Unclothed Echoes approaches the human body as an intimate archive — a site where personal histories, marks, and silences accumulate over time. Through carefully composed images accompanied by audio testimonies, the project challenges inherited ideas of visibility, vulnerability, and representation. The project’s first solo exhibition was held at the Goethe-Institut Kigali from January 10 to 22, 2025. Another developing project, A Glimpse into the World of Abahizi, documents a traditional music and dance cooperative in Rwanda, approaching cultural heritage as a living social practice shaped by continuity and change.

Beyond his individual work, Ryumugabe plays a key role in shaping Rwanda’s independent film and art ecosystem. He is the co-founder of KIRURI MFN, Artistic Director of KAZI Productions, and co-initiator and curator of the 250 Film Experiment Cine-Club in Kigali. He also works with festivals as a programmer and curator, including Kigali Cine-Junction, and participates in professional workshops as a mentor, notably Future Filmmakers and Power in Constraints. Through these initiatives, he contributes to the creation of spaces where experimentation, dialogue, and risk are not only possible, but necessary.

Rather than seeking certainty, Ryumugabe’s work insists on closeness — to faces, gestures, memories, and moments that rarely announce their importance. His cinema and images ask for patience, for a different way of looking, one that allows meaning to surface gradually and sometimes imperfectly. It is within this attentive, quietly rigorous practice that his work continues to grow, resisting fixed definitions and remaining open to what has yet to be seen.

Selected filmography

Written & directed

Murmurs from the Wind (Short, 2025)

Winter’s Quiet Reverie (Short, 2025)

At Last, a Film About You (Video art, 2025)

Things in the Psyche of an Awake Dreamer (Short, 2024)

A Wingless Bird That Flies (Short docufiction, 2023)

The Murmurings of Ajá (Video art, 2023)

Inyambo (Video art, 2022)

Each of Her Scars Has a Story (Short documentary, 2022)

From Here to There (Short film, 2022)

Mnemosyne (Short film, 2019)

Melpomene (Short film, 2018)

/ˈꞮƏRI/ (Short film, 2017)

Producing credits

Ako Kantu (Short, 2025)

Minimals in a Titanic World (Feature, 2025)

Memento Mori (Short, 2024)

Muzunga (Short film, 2022)

Imuhira (Short, 2021)

Sensory Overload (Short film, 2020)

Breaking the Silence

Limbo — Executive Producer and Cinematographer

Cinematography

Torment (Short, 2018)

Umwali (Short, 2022) — Cinematographer and Producer