Amelia Umuhire
Amelia Umuhire (born 1991) is a Rwandan-German film director, producer, and screenwriter. Biography. Umuhire was born in Kigali, Rwanda in 1991. She has two sisters, Anna Dushime, a journalist at Buzzfeed, and Amanda Mukasonga, who has performed with Umuhire. Her mother Esther Mujawayo is an activist and trauma therapist. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, her father and aunt were killed because they were Tutsi. Umuhire fled to Germany as a child, attending school and receiving German citizenship at age 11. Growing up, she found answers regarding identity and purpose in African-American culture. Umuhire moved to Vienna  to study and then to Berlin. In 2015, she made her directorial debut with the popular Web series "Polyglot". It received the Best German Web Series award. Umuhire directed the short film "Mugabo" in 2016. Filmed in Kigali, it features an Afro-European taking a visit to Rwanda for the first time since the 1994 genocide. She directed a commissioned video used as a performance piece for the twentieth-anniversary tour of "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill". In 2018, Umuhire directed a podcast about her father's life. Entitled "Vaterland", it was nominated for the Prix Europa. She directed the  video installation "King Who", filmed at her aunt's house, in 2019. Umuhire received the Villa Romana Prize in 2020. She made the experimental sound and video collage "Kana" about life on Mars in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at several film festivals, including MOCA Los Angeles, MCA Chicago, Tribeca Film Festival, Smithsonian African American Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam.