TWINS A FAR is a five-minute Rwandan horror-drama set in Musanze, in the literal shadow of the five volcanoes of the Virunga Massif, home to Rwanda’s mountain gorillas, and to a spiritual inheritance far older than any story usually told about this place. It follows Alice and Aline, twin sisters separated at birth. Alice was raised beside her grandmother in the shadow of the volcanoes, shielded since infancy by prayer. Aline was raised in a German foster family in New York City, unknowingly claimed by a cult that has spent twenty years waiting for her to come home. When the sisters finally meet, it looks like a reunion. It is, in truth, a reckoning, the closing of a bond that was never supposed to be completed.
This story does not begin in a writers’ room chasing a trend. It begins on the ground in Musanze, in the footprint of the five volcanoes, among the people and the gorillas that share that mountain air. The grandmother figure, Nyogokuru, and her prayer are drawn from a living Rwandan tradition of protection passed through the women of a family. The volcanoes are not a backdrop, they are a character, the same way the cold glass and concrete of New York become one for Aline. TWINS A FAR was written first as a feature film, a full mythology of two sisters and the world that tried to keep them apart. What the judging panel is seeing is the seed of that larger story, told at the scale that current funding allows
