Yes, Man short film UK Screening

In November 2011 Pervez of Live 2 Break and documentary maker Bret Syfert went to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda to teach children how to break as well as how to teach one another in an ‘each one, teach one’ initiative organised by Catalyst Rwanda, set up by Nicola Triscott and Kate Scanlan

The project was captured in a short documentary by Syfert, Yes Man, which will screen in the UK this week at the Southbank Centre and tells the story of the healing power of hip hop in a recovering culture.

In a heart warming story of compassion with roots set in a history of devastation and dark times in Rwanda’s recent history, the essence of Yes Man goes back 20 years when two friends, arts producer Nicola Triscott met teacher Rafiki Callixte when she visited Rwanda in 1992, eighteen months before the impending 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The planned mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in this small East African nation saw six out of Rafiki’s ten siblings killed with Rafiki scarcely surviving the genocide himself, betrayed by a friend who shot him in the back and left him for dead. Years of silence followed until one day in 2010 Rafiki and Nicola were reconnected via Facebook after 14 years.

In that time Rafiki founded Les Enfants de Dieu, a residential care centre for approximately 130 boys between the ages of four and 18 in Ndera, a suburb of Kigali, to transform the lives of street children that had been affected by the genocide.

Nicola then went to Rwanda and met the remarkable boys at Les Enfants de Dieu. When Rafiki and Nicola asked the boys what project or skill they would most like to learn, they unanimously replied: ‘hip-hop dance,’ the means through which they chose to express themselves.

Catalyst Rwanda is an initiative setting up sustainable programmes of arts activities for vulnerable young people in Rwanda, including street children and orphans of the genocide and AIDS, and to organise artistic development programmes with emerging Rwandan artists in partnership with Ishyo Arts Centre.

Now with the Southbank Centre, Catalyst Rwanda is bringing two of the boys from Les Enfants de Dieu to England, Willy and Didier, along with Rafiki to discuss the project along with the rest of the Yes Man crew.

Yes Man screens at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room as part of Africa Utopia on Thursday 19 July at 7.45pm with a free party afterwards with DJ Billy Biznizz