In 1994, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media outlets in Rwanda. A government-owned television channel, Télévision Nationale Rwandaise, had existed since 1992, but only those few who belonged to the elite could afford the cost of a television set at that time. Equally, there were no proper Rwandan cinemas other than a few cinés in Kigali and in the university city of Butare. These cinés screened imported films, mostly on VHS, for local paying audiences, and some of them still exist but they are now primarily offering broadcasts of sport events such as the Champions League. Nonetheless, an audiovisual culture has developed in Rwanda over the last few decades with no less than twelve television channels of which eleven are privately owned while the dominant one, Rwanda Television (RTV), is state-owned and run by the Rwandan Broadcasting Agency (RBA) that provides news and entertainment for the Rwandan public in three languages, Kinyarwanda, English, and French. In 2011, a multiplex cinema, Century Cinema, opened as part of the prestige building Kigali City Tower in the central business district of Kigali, with four screens, including a 4D film screen, which regularly screens Hollywood, Bollywood, and some African films. There is also a two-screen cinema in Nyamirambo, Star Cinema. However, ownership of televisions sets and visits to the cinema remain modest, and are in fact a luxury for most Rwandans, and instead the main source for consuming audiovisual media is the cell phone. In this chapter, the main focus will be on Rwandan film production, and to a lesser degree on television programming, although these two sometimes overlap.

Rwanda's film industry has expended rapidly over the last twenty years, but it is a development that started from nothing, and the local film industry is still miniscule in comparison to Hollywood or the closer New Nigerian cinema or “Nollywood” as it is often carelessly called. The Rwandan film industry even has its own epithet, Hillywood, an analogy to Rwanda being identified as the land of a thousand hills. Filmmaker and CEO of The Kwetu Film Institute, Eric Kabera, has stated that this development started with the production of 100 Days (2001), a British-Rwandan co-production that became the first narrative feature film on the Rwandan genocide and predated Hotel Rwanda by three years.