A decade after the genocide that ripped apart Rwanda, how are the children of that country to move forward with their lives? That is the question at the heart of this remarkable debut feature from Lee Isaac Chung, a Korean-American from Arkansas who studied medicine at Yale before he decided to make films.

Ngabo (Jeff Rutagenwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye) leave Kigali and journey to the home Sangwa left three years prior - they agree to tell his parents they are on a journey looking for work. In fact, they have another, more troubling objective in mind. Munyurangabo wants justice for his parents who were killed in the genocide, and Sangwa wants to visit the home he deserted years ago. Sangwa's resolve weakens as he is accepted by his family, but they remain suspicious, even hostile towards his friend, a Tutsi whose parents died in the conflict.

Shot in just 11 days while Chung was teaching filmmaking at a relief mission, with three orphans of the genocide playing key roles, Munyurangabo begins as an apparently straightforward immersion in a specific time and place, but develops into more complex and moving inquiry about the chances for reconciliation.

A son of Korean immigrants, Chung grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas, and then attended Yale University to study Biology. At Yale, with exposure to art cinema in his senior year, he dropped his plans for medical school and pursued filmmaking. MUNYURANGABO is his first feature film. He resides in New York with his wife Valerie, and manages Almond Tree Films, a production company he founded with his collaborators, Samuel Anderson and Jenny Lund.

"Intense empathy courses throughout Chung's first feature, but more remarkable is his ability to foster great kinship between viewer and subject, his largely handheld cinematography generating forceful intimacy with his story's two teenage protagonists [...] as well as a tactile sense of environment. Both qualities run deep in this piercing, authentic, and condescension-free tale." - Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

"Like a bolt out of the blue, Lee Isaac Chung achieves an astonishing and thoroughly masterful debut [...] by several light years the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the 15-year-old genocide that wracked Rwanda." - Robert Koehler, Variety