Gabriel, aged 10, lives in a comfortable ex-pat neighborhood in Burundi, his ‘small country’. Gabriel is a normal kid, happy, carefree and having adventures with his friends and little sister. Then in 1993, tensions in neighboring Rwanda spill over, threatening his family and his innocence.

“We walked into a great nightmare.” Unfortunately, childhood sometimes becomes – at first progressively and then suddenly – a lost paradise, cracked through by arguments between adults before getting devastated by unbridled human violence, in the worst cases. Such has been the youthful fate of writer Gaël Faye, confronted with the tremors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 while he lived in Bujumbra, the capital of neighbouring Burundi. From the innocence of kids games to the emergence of ethnic hatred, latent threats, creeping danger and ambient chaos, up to the face-to-face with death and madness, the novelist has masterfully retraced this cruelly initiatory trajectory in Small Country: An African Childhood, a book crowned with multiple awards in 2016 and which director Éric Barbier seized to make a faithful and truly honest adaptation for the big screen. Cineuropa

Eric Barbier was born on June 29, 1960 in Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. He is a writer and director, known for Promise at Dawn (2017), Small Country: An African Childhood (2020) and Le brasier (1991).