Acts of Reconciliation

"She wanted to do things we thought she wasn't old enough for," her mom, Nina Waters, recalls by phone from Destin, Fla. "She was interested in everything." Growing up in the Panhandle, Hinson pranced around filming tableaux with her friend Ashley. They had one campy horror scene featuring a body falling from a window and a shot of the lifeless corpse on the ground.

Hinson also had the director's impulse for choreographing others. She collected costumes from thrift shops and played little old men herself; one Halloween she dressed football players in gowns. She hosted dinner parties, requesting that invitees don formalwear.

"We were the cooks," her mother recalls. "We'd wait on them -- they'd be smoking their fake cigarettes." Hinson was elected president of Fort Walton Beach High School for three years.

She's religious now but wasn't always. Raised Episcopalian, Hinson says she didn't get "serious" about it until after Furman, when she joined the Anglican Mission in the Americas. That group broke away from the Episcopal Church -- rejecting its liberal reforms, including the acceptance of gay clergy -- under the auspices of Rwanda's church.

The link led her local congregation to plan a trip to Rwanda in 2005. She didn't sign up to go. She was frenzied, searching for a suitable thesis topic. But one congregant dropped out and a pastor urged Hinson to take the spot. When she got there, she knew she had found her film. She came back and started researching, planning to shoot in the summer of 2006.

She was so interested in the topic that she hosted a dinner at Armand's Pizza on Capitol Hill for a Rwandan bishop who was working to facilitate reconciliation. There she met a fellow American University student who was also planning on filming in Rwanda in June. He and his friend agreed to shoot her movie, if she'd provide room and board.

They also brought a Canon camera to add to the Panasonic MiniDV the university had lent her. She found the translator, Emmanuel Kwizera, through the Internet mailing list of a Ugandan missionary who had just visited Rwanda. Kwizera proved crucial to earning the trust of victims and killers, especially since he was a survivor himself who knew four languages.

"He would go in first," Hinson says, "elicit stories and then ask whether they'd be involved."

In 30 days, without permits, which Rwanda may or may not require -- "it's not clear" -- Hinson filmed 55 hours of footage. She cut it down to 53 minutes on her Mac. Her Emmy-winning composers charged her $8,000 for a score that would usually cost twice as much. Two families from her church gave her $18,000. Mia Farrow lent her voice to the narration, after Hinson was introduced to her through the staff of a Virginia congressman. The Rwandan president agreed to an interview on the last day of shooting. Her total cost came to $25,000.

"This film typically would've cost at least a couple hundred thousand dollars to make," Hinson says. "It'll never be like this ever again. I know that, but people want to help when you're a student."

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre's cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a "tremendously hopeful" picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. "I feel kinda crazy," she recalls him saying. "And I still love you."