Sangwa and Ngabo, a pair of teenage best friends who’ve been eking out a living on their own in the years following the Rwandan genocide, drop in on Sangwa’s hometown while on their way to fulfull a morally questionable mission. Their reception is complicated and chilly: “That boy you are with, don’t you know he’s a Tutsi? Don’t you know Tutsis are nasty?” says Sangwa’s father, a lanky and foreboding presence. “Hutus and Tutsis are enemies. Don’t you know?”

Much of the boys’ emotional journey takes place without words, as Sangwa sinks back into the comforting rhythms of a home he left behind—turning over soil, patching a wall, his mother’s doting, his father’s eventual respect—while Ngabo grows increasingly impatient to leave the hostile little village and get on with their original endgame. The boys’ friendship evolves and splinters, with the specter of genocide going pointedly unmentioned for much of the movie. The film is visually gorgeous—damp hills and red earth and quiet, restrained tableaus—and it climaxes with an astounding single-take, cathartic, spoken-word epic that dives unselfconsciously into pain, horror, and love for a fractured nation: “We saw rivers clogged with bodies, children killing…And the blood covered the earth.”

[Interesting side note: Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung is actually an American filmmaker (Korean-American from Arkansas, to be specific) who set his story of adolescent friendship in rural Rwanda, in what Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir describes as an “under-the-radar mini-trend you might call indie globalization.” I noticed the same odd, ambitious transplantation in last year’s The Pool (director Chris Smith adapted an American short story into a film set in Goa, India). In both cases, despite tangled implications, the gamble works surprisingly well.]

Munyurangabo plays at Northwest Film Forum through Thursday, July 2nd.