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• Ms. Acquaro's photo essay
• God Sleeps in Rwanda
• Ms. Acquaro's bio

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Tavis: Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman are the filmmaking duo behind the Oscar-nominated documentary, "God Sleeps in Rwanda.' The film is the story of the aftermath of Rwandan genocide and is up for an Oscar next month in the Documentary Short Subject category. Narrated by Rosario Dawson, here now a scene from "God Sleeps in Rwanda.'

[A film clip is shown]

Tavis: Kimberlee and Stacy, nice to have you here.

Stacy Sherman: Thank you.

Kimberlee Acquaro: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: And congratulations on the Oscar nomination. It's heady stuff, huh?

Sherman: Yes.

Tavis: I suspect that that kind of accolade never crosses one's mind - or ones, plural in this case - hanging out in Rwanda trying to put a project like this together, but it must be awfully rewarding to know that, after all that work, something like this comes out of it.

Acquaro: It really is. I think we're most pleased that attention is coming to this deserving story.

Tavis: What for you - this may sound like a silly question with an issue like this - but what for you made this such a deserving story when you put it together back then?

Sherman: I had first come across it because of the articles that Kimberlee had written about the women that are in the film. When I read the articles, I was so moved. You know, you read a lot of things obviously and are desensitized in a way, but they just jumped out at me, each of the women that she had written about. Then when you meet them in person, which Kimberlee had before, it just became so evident that their stories should be out there. We never imagined that it would have the outreach that it has had.

Tavis: These stories are remarkable. How did you - I mean, when you have this kind of genocide taking place, there are any number of stories one could choose from, obviously. The five stories of these women that you focus on in this story are all powerful. I was saying before we came on the air that this piece is twenty-eight minutes. That's a lot of power packed into a twenty-eight minute documentary. But you picked five women to tell their stories. How did you choose these five? I want to talk in a minute about what the stories are of these five, but how did you pick these five?

Acquaro: I think the women are each representative of something that happened to the people of Rwanda during the genocide. Their stories together follow an arc of sort of loss and recovery and we wanted the film to do that.

Tavis: So we saw a moment ago a tease, at least, about one story of the sister who ends up HIV Positive. Let's talk about her story first and we'll talk about a few of the others.

Sherman: Of Odette?

Tavis: Yeah.

Sherman: She was a policewoman studying to become a lawyer and, as you saw from the clip or maybe it didn't say it in the clip, not for anything except to help people who are HIV Positive and she's raising her sister's daughter. Her sister died in the genocide and she's got two children of her own, one who is also HIV Positive. She's a complete inspiration. Not to use a clichéd word, but for all of the work that she's doing, to have AIDS in Africa is a stigma which makes it all the more --

Acquaro: - yeah, it's very unusual for a woman, for anyone, but especially a woman, to speak out about being HIV Positive. A really wonderful follow-up to Odette's story is that, one day while she was working in the police station, a man came in who'd been in an automobile accident and they fell in love and Odette is now married to a pastor, Joseph.

Tavis: Nice happy ending to that story.

Acquaro: Yes.

Tavis: There's another story, another woman you feature in here who ends up being raped as a number of these women do, but this one ends up not just being raped, but being impregnated by the rapist. I'll let you take the story from there.

Acquaro: For me, Savera's(sp?) story was the most impactful. Not that you can quantify the experiences these women have, but she named her child Ocumana(sp?) which means blessing from God, or child of God. This is a child born to her of the men that killed her other seven children and for her to embrace this little girl and to give her such a hopeful name is really a symbol and a metaphor to me of what this film is about, what the story is about and why we made this film because it's about hope.

Tavis: I wonder what happens when you happen to be not of African descent and you descend upon this country of Rwanda, and you come in contact with empowering and enlightening stories like these, what that does for you and for your sense of what womanhood is.

Sherman: That was a concern, how we would be received in going and how legitimate would we feel. But because Kimberlee had gone before, they were so warm and welcoming of Kimberlee and, because of that, they were that way towards me as well, the women in the film. I mean, it personally changed me forever and the work that I hope to do. There's no way to go there and to not be changed by that experience.

Acquaro: I do think that, in the genocide, the regime at the time wanted us to believe it was just another African conflict. For me, it wasn't. It was meaningful because there were so many stories of tragedy coming out of Africa and this was a story of hope. There is a lot of hope and a lot of courage and a lot of resilience in Africa, and that isn't usually focused on. But to me, it wasn't as much an African story or even a women's story, but a human story and about triumph of the spirit and of courage.

It did affect me as a woman. It affected me as a mother. We're both mothers and I think we feel the same way. When you're a mother, every fiber of your being wants to protect those little lives, and there are so many parents in the world who can't do that. Seeing what these women have gone through to make the world a better place for their children really compels me to keep doing this work and to try to give a voice to parents who don't have one but want the same things that we want for our families.

Tavis: To that last point, Kimberlee, this question might sound political. It's not meant to be, but I want to offer it anyway. We all know, we've seen the movie, "Hotel Rwanda,' we see this documentary, "God Sleeps in Rwanda" - we'll explain this title here in just a second. I should have done that at the top of our conversation. We'll come back to the title and why it's called "God Sleeps in Rwanda" in a moment - but you talk about how it affected you as women.

I wonder whether or not it affected your world view, if it affected, for that matter, your view of America because I think everybody recognizes now, you're the filmmakers here, that we, the United States and, for that matter, other countries of the world, should have moved and could have moved much more swiftly and with much more certainty than we did. I have interviewed Bill Clinton any number of times and one of the most powerful confessions he ever made to me was that, as president, one of the mistakes he made was not moving fast enough in Rwanda. It's easy to say that, of course, after the fact, but how did this affect your politics or your world view?

Sherman: It's hard for it not to. Personally, you can't help but feel that. How could they not have done more? How could anyone not have done more? You hope the film reaches people and makes people want to help do what they can now, to look back on anything, whether it's Rwanda or what's happening now in Iraq or what happened sixty years ago in Hiroshima. You know, there are a lot of blunders.

Acquaro: I think that when you meet the people who lived through these tragedies, you can't help but be moved and more concerned about people who are living through them now, like the people of Sudan. You also realize that our political will as Americans goes a long way, but we have an individual responsibility and I certainly feel that. I feel so blessed with the opportunities and the freedoms that we have, but I feel that comes with a tremendous responsibility. We have to motivate. And I hope that that's something our film will do, to motivate people to take individual responsibility by engaging and being concerned about these sort of issues. Because we can make a difference, and our country can make a difference.

Tavis: This title, "God Sleeps in Rwanda,' got my attention and, for that matter, I guess anyone who sees it starts saying "God Sleeps in Rwanda,' what does that mean?" So you should explain this.

Sherman: It has a bit of a double meaning actually.

Acquaro: It's from an old Rwandan proverb. It says basically "My country is such a beautiful country that, although God may wander the world during the day, He returns at night to sleep in Rwanda.' Yet when you first hear "God Sleeps in Rwanda,' you think where was He during the genocide, which is a question that many Rwandan people ask or were asking themselves at the time.

Tavis: What's your sense of how the women in that country - there are so many of them, you know. There were so many men, women and children killed, but there's so many women in that country now - what's your sense of how they view that proverb on this side of the genocide?

Acquaro: There's a phrase in Rwanda that, before the genocide, people would greet each other with it in the morning. Basically it says, in the morning I'll greet you and say, "Oh, you've woken." Now it has a much different meaning and especially immediately during the genocide and immediately after. I think that this proverb probably does too.

Sherman: It's a complicated question. I'm sure each person would view that differently.

Tavis: I expect so. "God Sleeps in Rwanda,' a documentary film by Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman, narrated by Rosario Dawson, nominated for Best Documentary for an Academy Award this year. These are not the things that get all the hype the next day with the Best Actor and the Best Film and the Best Director, but they are. This category, I think, every year represents the powerful stories that are being told that can enlighten and empower and encourage each of us in our walk as citizens of the world. Kimberlee and Stacy, congratulations again. Nice to have you on the program.

Sherman: Thank you very much.

Acquaro: Thank you so much, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.