Filmmakers Talk “Earth Made of Glass” (Deborah Scranton, Director; Reid Carolin, Producer)

(Deborah Scranton): “Well, I think for both Reid and I, we’re very interested in ground-level narratives. We don’t go in with an idea of ‘We’re going to get this,’ we really want to know what the story is and tell it from the inside-out versus the outside-in. So, for us, it was really learning about what it was—what it meant to be there. The film follows two characters: one, the President of the country (President Paul Kagame) and his fight for the truth to come out—his fight for the country, basically; and our other character, Jean-Pierre Sagahutu, was a genocide survivor and has been searching for 15 years for who killed his father, who was the doctor of the Kabuye region. So it’s following those twin narratives, and wherever they led us.”

(Reid Carolin): “Yeah, that about covers it.” (laughs)

(RC): “We went to interview a lady named Rose Kabuye, who was the Chief of Protocol in President Kagame’s government in Rwanda. We mostly wanted to talk to her because his government is predominately composed, or the majority of people in government, are females, so we wanted to talk with someone who was a really strong presence there. So we started speaking with her, and then one day we woke up and found out that she had been arrested by France, and we had no idea why. So she was being detained in France, and we started figuring out that there was this conspiracy going on, and that sort of triggered us to jump off and tell that story the way that we did—so it happened sort of serendipitously, actually.” 

(DS): “And we were just lucky. It was, for me, one of the most memorable moments ever in my life when we were in Rwanda when these protests broke out, because, basically the country shut down and we were filming protests with hundreds of thousands of people all protesting that she had been arrested on this arrest warrant, which was basically issued by a French terrorism judge as a counter to a Rwandan inquiry that had charged French officials with acts of complicity in the genocide. So, our film is about laying bare some of these truths that really haven’t seen the light of day.”

(RC):  “We’re talking about a guy who’s our central character who has been looking for 15 years for the killer of his dad. And one day, to be in a rainstorm and seeing a guy come out of the rain and pass by our car and then all of a sudden—you know, who needs to get out of the storm and everything—to find out that this guy is one of the killers of his dad, and then for them to have a conversation, and for that to lead where it leads in the film, I think, is a once in a lifetime occurrence. You could call it ‘Movie Gods,’ you can call it ‘Gods of life’ or whatever, but some things just happened that we never expected—and I think that’s what it makes it a great documentary anyway.”

(RC): “I think you really need to want to be a storyteller in the most basic way, which is to really enjoy the act of going to wherever you’re going and immersing yourself and staying out of the way and being true to somebody’s story. And I think it’s also a lot of dirty, hard work and it’s not the film festival side of things, it’s the exact opposite. This is the week where we all get to enjoy ourselves and try to push this out there, but I think you really have to be thick-skinned and be able to live that kind of lifestyle. It’s not an easy one to explain.”

(DS): “I think that film is a collaborative process, and for me, it’s having a producing partner like Reid and our DP, PH, we work really well together. We help each other, and it only makes it better and to find that camaraderie and trust—because it comes to trust and belief in each other—is really important. I don’t think you can make a successful film unless you have that as a framework or a basis, because you’re all going at it together, able to read each other, and working towards the same thing.”