Nicole Avant Talks Netflix’s Rwandan Genocide-Set Drama ‘Trees of Peace’ and Wanting to Make Movies That Affect the Human Spirit

variety.com:

Angelique Jackson When “Trees of Peace,” a drama set during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, surged into the top 10 English-language films on Netflix in June, some may have been amazed that a low-budget, albeit critically acclaimed indie was among the most-watched movies of the week.

But executive producer Nicole Avant (“The Black Godfather”) wasn’t among them. “It was incredible. I was surprised how quickly it got so much attention, but I wasn’t surprised,” Avant tells Variety about learning that the film racked up more than 9.3 million hours viewed in those first few days.

To Avant, the numbers indicated that audiences was ready for and interested in stories like this, despite its heavy subject matter. “We’ve all felt pretty beaten up for many years, with all this social unrest happening in the United States and everywhere around the world, and just so much negativity,” she explains. “Then here comes this film about strength, about courage, being victorious, being vulnerable, about friendship and about love, just the importance of us looking at each other as one tribe and one family — which is the human family and the human race — I think that’s what people responded to energetically.” Plus, seeing that the film ranked in the top 10 in more than 30 countries proved another truth about the audience: “We might look different and sound different, speak a different language and be a different religion, but the heart is the same,” she adds.

Written and directed by Alanna Brown, “Trees of Peace” centers on four women — Annick (Eliane Umuhire), a Hutu moderate; Mutesi (Bola Koleosho), a Tutsi woman; Jeanette (Charmaine Bingwa), a Christian nun; and Peyton (Ella Cannon), an American girl visiting Rwanda as part of the Peace