Gautier Muhire

Gautier Muhire

Gautier Muhire was born on October 5th, 1980, to Andrew Ngira, a medical doctor, and Roda Mukanshimye, a nurse. Gautier was the eldest of four siblings. He is survived by two younger sisters and a brother. For six years he lived in Rwanda in a simple and comfortable childhood with a large extended family. But in 1986, a new journey started for the family when they moved from Rwanda to Belgium. He remembers the change very vividly because the first thing he noticed was the change in climate from the tropical, sunny weather of Rwanda to the freezing cold of a November in Belgium. Gautier had only seen that world on television and in movies. He had never seen people of a different color in real-life. The cultural shock would have been so great if he was not too busy discovering that new world. You see, we had a television in Rwanda and a great collection of French films for our friends and family to watch. But there were no television channels in Rwanda. So, when we moved to Belgium, he discovered television channels, with cartoons, football, and the news which all opened the world to him.

To the chagrin of his mother, he never left the side of the television, and we can say that his love for movies and filmmaking started at that young age of six. Fortunately, he was a good student and worked on his homework purely so he would be able to watch television. Gautier and his father would seat together and watch the news, with his father explaining the world and telling him that one day he would see as much of it as he wanted. Our father’s dream was to move to the United States, the true land of opportunities.

In 1992, the family moved back to Rwanda, but a civil war was ravaging the country. The war was so hard it led into a genocide that forced us to move back to Belgium. But for our father, the safety of Belgium was not as a great as the United States of America. So, in 1997, we moved to the United States. Life in the United States gave Gautier a chance to daydream of a career in the film industry. However, for a refugee, the dream of conquering the film industry seemed almost impossible. So, when he went to Ball State University to study political science in the hopes of becoming a lawyer instead; deep down he always thought he would become a screenwriter.

Gautier spent years writing terrible scripts because he had no formal training. It is only after tragically becoming sick with peripheral neuropathy and being paralyzed for two years that all the dreams of becoming a filmmaker resurfaced. Gautier had always been a resilient individual, probably due to some of the tragic events that happened in his life. He spent two years learning to walk again and as soon as he could walk, he enrolled into college but this time to study film. He joined Riverside City College and spent years learning every aspect of filmmaking until a professor recommended him to transfer to the University of California, Riverside. At the university, he directed films, won awards for his screenplays, and made connections with the film industry in Hollywood. His goals were to start a studio company and make films that took inspiration from his upbringing in Africa, Europe and America. He also wished to turn into movies the many comic books that captured his imagination during his childhood in Belgium. Some days, he pinched himself when filming or editing a film because he was living a boyhood dream. He often said, “It is with resilience that you achieve any goal, but it is with patience that you get resilience.”