Rwanda and France / 2002 / 23mins / Drama / French

About Braids is a magical encounter between a mysterious young woman and a gifted African hair-braider who is asked to recreate a completely unconventional style. This film was winner of the Best Short Film at Milan and Zanzibar 2003, as well as the People's Prize at Cannes.

Jacqueline Kalimunda

Jacqueline Kalimunda was born in Kigali, Rwanda in 1974 and lived in Kenya, Madagascar and the UK before settling in France. After graduating in business and in history, she started working in film production. She trained as an editor and worked on documentaries and TV films. She also worked as continuity on French TV series. In 2002 she wrote, directed and co-produced her first film, the 23 minute multi-awarded Histoire de tresses (About Braids). The short film was also distributed in theaters in the UK and the USA. The documentary Homeland (2005) is the conclusion of a long project started when she was researching images of Rwanda for her graduation thesis with historians Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Hélène d’Almeida Topor. For this award winning documentary, Jacqueline Kalimunda unveiled 80 years of unpublished film archives on Rwanda. In 2007 and 2008, Jacqueline Kalimunda directed the first and second season of the TV series Imagine Afrika, broadcasted in 35 African countries on public TV channels in English, French, Swahili, Zulu, Portuguese. In 2010 she directed in co-production with Canal Plus the feature film High Life (Lala & les Gaous). An alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus, Jacqueline Kalimunda produced and directed Burning Down in 2012, a Focus Features Africa First short movie with Eriq Ebouaney and Cyril Guei. In 2016, Kalimunda wrote and directed Floris, a documentary in the Kinyarwanda language that is a hymn to love as seen through one of the last real flower shops in Kigali. Learn More