Memories of a loved one: The camera explores the dark confines of a flat. Light is still burning in the kitchen; objects are scattered haphazardly on the living room tables. The eyes follow into the labyrinthine self, now turned into space, of a once familiar and now absent person. The narrator’s voice begins by asserting that everything in this place is true. It “shows” the places where the remembered person learned to crochet and where she shelled peas.
The narrative remains factual, but a gap begins to open. Ghost-like apparitions intrude in the old video images, phantom voices populate the noise-like echo sounds. Just like the crocheting and the peas, a naked murderer and other unpleasant shadows are part of the house inspected here. As things progress, individual threads are spun together to form the symbolic crocheted doily of a home. Incredibly poetic and very personal, Ayden Lamb’s “Haunted House” brings to life on film a person who during their lifetime was present – had to be present – in two worlds.

Maybe it really was the innocent hand of an infant clasping a soldier’s index finger that was to determine the course of three lives. Lives that did not end in early death after all, but continued in the asylum of a foreign country. The Rutikaras reside on the outskirts of the capital of Rwanda and call their newborn child Justice, because justice is really becoming scarce in their country. In the spring of 1994, when the little boy is six months old, the political situation is getting increasingly tense, the Tutsi ethnic minority is being hunted, abused and murdered by the Hutu militias. In the summer of that year, the world learned of the extent of the violence: a genocide with hundreds of thousands killed. The Rutikaras are affected, too. But with luck, chance and their unperturbable baby they manage to save themselves in the care of the United Nations.
Director Justice Rutikara, born in Kigali and grown up in Quebec, is the son of Valentine and Jean-Claude, who report from offscreen. His first animated film, carried by broadly coloured images, an impressive factuality and mild poetry, is a memento that rises above the individual and takes on a universal note in the chorus of human sounds, all the unifying and threatening ones.