Cinema · Human rights · Memory
Commitment and projects
A trajectory of a man of communication, memory, and the field — convinced that speech, image, and engagement can repair, instruct, and awaken consciences.
HUMAN RIGHTS & POLITICS
Activist commitment
Very young, Ntahuga chose the side of those who stand tall. At the Burundian League for Human Rights Iteka, he defended dignity openly. In Belgium, in Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, he served as political secretary of the Ecolo party, advocating for a more just society and a land that breathes better.
An expert in communication, cooperation, and international relations, he has worked from Libya to South Africa, from Togo to Mali, from Ghana to Uganda, where wounds remain open and where hopes, though fragile, still hold.
LOOKING AT THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY
Cinematographic commitment
Before being a matter of images, cinema is, for B. Claude Ntahuga, a way of looking at the world: giving it a voice, and making visible those whom History, society, or institutions too often leave in the shadows.
His on-screen commitment extends a broader trajectory — that of a man of communication, memory, and the field, convinced that the image can instruct, repair, and awaken consciences. Through documentaries, docu-fictions, awareness films, and institutional productions, he has told Burundi differently: through its women, its children, its marginalised communities, its peace-builders, and its anonymous builders.
From the early 2000s, he participated in projects that questioned coexistence, speech, and reconciliation. With Pour mieux s’entendre and Les mots sages, made alongside Kaos Films and RTBF, he learned an audiovisual writing where testimony reweaves the bonds that silence had eroded.
Over the years, his work unfolds at the crossroads of social cinema, communication for development, and collective memory. As producer, director, assistant director, or production manager, he has accompanied films devoted to education, maternal and child health, juvenile justice, women’s participation, children’s rights, and civic dynamics.
FROM THE PROVINCIAL CAPITAL TO THE HILLS
Cinema as palaver
But his commitment did not stop at production: he brought cinema where screens almost never arrived. In Burundi as in South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he made itinerant cinema a tool of awareness, dialogue, and social transformation.
The principle was simple and powerful: produce films on major social issues, then screen them as close as possible to the inhabitants. A team of journalists, facilitators, and technicians criss-crossed the country, from the provincial capital to the most remote hills. Before each screening, a journalist-moderator set the context and prepared the debate. In the morning, a short street interview was often filmed in the village itself: shown at the opening of the evening, it allowed the inhabitants to recognise themselves immediately on screen.
« The evening then became a genuine public space. The screening was followed by an interactive debate, conducted in Kirundi and French, in the manner of palaver: everyone could react, question, testify, contradict, propose. The screen became a mirror. »
The spectators no longer received a message from elsewhere; they questioned each other, sometimes confronted each other, and gradually became the protagonists of their own awareness. This approach has lastingly marked his vision: cinema must not only be watched, but discussed, appropriated, prolonged by collective speech. The image opens the way; it is the community that gives it its scope.
WITNESS, MEMORY, MIRROR, ADVOCACY
A camera that is never neutral
His films do not only seek to inform: they want to touch, shift the gaze, provoke awareness.
Les bâtisseurs d’avenir shows those who, far from the spotlights, rebuild the social fabric. Les Batwa de Muruta: une communauté oubliée draws attention to a marginalised population and reminds us that cinema can be an act of symbolic justice. Mon avenir n’est pas dans la rue, produced for UNICEF, highlights vulnerable children and their right to something other than survival: dignity, protection, a future.
His commitment also passes through the recognition of women’s place. Umufasoni inkingi y’umuryango — Woman, pillar of the family — summarises a conviction: no society is built durably without recognising the central role of women, in the family, the community, the economy, and public life.
For B. Claude Ntahuga, the camera is witness, memory, mirror, and sometimes advocacy. It approaches human realities with modesty, but also with the will to bring out what we often prefer not to see. From this journey emerges a constancy: a useful cinema, rooted in African realities, where each film becomes a window open onto a question, a community, a pain, or a hope.
15 FILMS — 2003-2014
Selective filmography
Producer, director, assistant director, production manager — a journey in service of memory and collective voice.
| Year | Film | Production | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Umufasoni inkingi y’umuryango (Woman, pillar of the family) | Target Consulting | Producer |
| 2012 | Justice for minors: a wager for Burundi | Terre des Hommes | Production Manager |
| 2011 | Pathfinder International serving maternal and child health | Pathfinder International Burundi | Production Manager |
| 2011 | My future is not on the street | UNICEF | Producer |
| 2010 | Education for all: at the school of knowledge | UNICEF | Producer |
| 2010 | The place of women in elections | NDI / IRIBA | Producer |
| 2010 | COSOME and the elections | COSOME | Producer |
| 2010 | The Observer in Burundi | IRIBA | Producer and Director |
| 2010 | Ntamwana n’ikinono | CNR | Production Manager |
| 2009 | Imanga ntimarira Imana | IRIBA | Producer |
| 2008 | The Batwa of Muruta: a forgotten community | IRIBA | Director |
| 2006 | The builders of the future | IRIBA | Director |
| 2004 | Duhurize hamwe | Kaos Films / IRIBA | Producer |
| 2003 | Les mots sages | Kaos Films / RTBF | Assistant Director |
| 2003 | Pour mieux s’entendre | Kaos Films | Assistant Director |