While women undoubtedly are part of the cinematic depiction of the official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide, they nevertheless mostly feature in the background, behind prominent male political actors such as Roméo Dallaire, Paul Kagame, and Carl Wilkens. This is especially true for Rwandan women, who are almost solely featured as victims, while Rwandan men are featured as both victims and perpetrators. Exceptions to this are found in the three feature films, A Sunday in Kigali, ‘94 Terror, and Trees of Peace, which prominently focus on rape, women victims, and survivors respectively. However, films and television documentaries which retell the official history of the Rwandan genocide create a collective memory that is dominant in relation to these alterative versions of the same memory.

Historically, wartime sexual violence has foremost been aimed at women, with rape frequently used as a means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate the enemy. However, sexual violence does not just constitute rape, it also includes sexual mutilation with the genocidal intent of destroying women's reproductive capabilities, and sexual slavery, something that occurred on a regular basis during the genocide and is exposed, for example, in ‘94 Terror.

One story which is surprisingly absent in the official historical media memory is precisely the one about all the rapes committed as part of the genocide. Another somewhat ironic absence—seen in relation to the story in A Sunday in Kigali where the white protagonist makes a documentary about AIDS, while being ignorant about the imminent genocide—is the story of HIV/AIDS as one of the dire consequences of genocidal rape. A third is the story about all “war babies” that were a result of the endless rapes. All these stories are typically not part of the male-oriented official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide, and this is in spite of the fact that it is estimated that somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 girls and women were raped—that is, nearly all surviving Tutsi women—and that the Rwandan genocide was the first genocide in which rape was officially declared to be a war crime by an international court.