Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s debut in Cannes, a film that resists definition and finds its strength in the fragile space between emergence and recognition.
There are films that arrive at Cannes as finished objects, polished and self-contained, and then there are those that feel as if they are still in the process of becoming something in front of us. Ben’Imana, the debut feature by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, presented within the orbit of the Cannes Film Festival and recognised with the Camera d’Or distinction for best first feature, belongs firmly to the second category. It does not impose itself as an arrival; it behaves more like a threshold — a point of passage where cinema is still negotiating its own language.
Inside the Palais, where first films are often measured against an invisible scale of expectation and discovery, Ben’Imana carries a particular kind of attention. Not the attention reserved for established names or programmed certainties, but the more fragile, more uncertain gaze that Cannes occasionally grants to a debut that resists easy framing. There is always a different kind of silence that accompanies those screenings — less ceremonial, more investigative. As if the room itself understands that something untested is being offered and that its response will inevitably shape how that work will exist in the world afterward.
What emerges from Dusabejambo’s film — even before any attempt at summary or categorisation — is a sense of authorship grounded in listening rather than declaration. The Camera d’Or has historically rewarded works that do not simply introduce a filmmaker, but expose a sensibility still in formation, still willing to risk imbalance in exchange for truth. In that lineage, Ben’Imana feels less like a statement and more like an encounter. A cinema that does not yet fully know its own edges.
There is a particular visual restraint that runs through the film’s reception: not minimalism as aesthetic choice, but as ethical posture. The camera does not rush toward meaning. It observes. It holds distance without withdrawal. It allows moments to exist without immediately translating them into narrative function. In a festival environment where so many films are shaped by urgency — the urgency to impress, to resolve, to define themselves quickly in the minds of critics — this slower intelligence stands out not through excess, but through refusal.
It is tempting, especially within the machinery of Cannes discourse, to situate every debut within a geography of influence or expectation. To read it through national cinema, through emerging trends, through the ever-expanding taxonomy of global auteurism. But Ben’Imana resists that kind of immediate positioning. It feels less interested in representing a system than in articulating a personal grammar — one that is still being written in real time, in front of the viewer.
That is perhaps why the Camera d’Or recognition carries a particular resonance here. The award is not simply a form of validation; it is a declaration that something unfinished has been seen as worthy of continuation. That a voice, still forming its cadence, has already been heard as distinct. In the context of Cannes — where visibility is both opportunity and pressure — such recognition does not close a narrative. It opens one.
What lingers after the screening is not resolution, but texture. A sense of cinema as something provisional, something that does not yet fully belong to itself. The images of Ben’Imana, as they settle in memory, do not arrange themselves into a clear trajectory. Instead, they return as fragments of attention: a gesture held slightly longer than expected, a pause that refuses to become narrative transition, a framing that suggests presence rather than explanation.
And perhaps that is where Dusabejambo’s film finds its quiet strength — in its refusal to accelerate toward legibility. It understands, instinctively or deliberately, that first films are often burdened by the expectation of arrival. Yet here, arrival is not the point. Exposure is.
Within the broader landscape of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where so many works are already positioned within trajectories of authorship, industry, or future distribution, Ben’Imana occupies a more vulnerable space. It is not yet a reference. It is not yet a discourse. It is, instead, a presence that asks to be looked at without the safety net of pre-definition.
There is something quietly radical in that posture. In a cinematic culture increasingly driven by anticipation — by what a filmmaker will become, what a film will lead to, what career it might inaugurate — this work insists on the present tense. On the idea that a first film does not need to justify itself through what comes next.
As the lights came up and the audience slowly re-entered the architecture of the Palais, there was no singular reaction that could contain the film’s effect. Only the familiar dispersion that follows works that have not resolved themselves into consensus. Conversations broke apart rather than consolidated. Interpretations remained tentative. And in that hesitation, something of the film’s logic seemed to extend beyond the screen.
Ben’Imana, in the end, does not announce a filmmaker fully formed. It reveals the moment just before form settles — the unstable, necessary space where cinema is still learning how to speak without yet knowing exactly what it wants to say.
And perhaps that is what the Camera d’Or, at its best, has always recognised: not arrival, but the courage of beginning without guarantee.