25 New Face filmmaker Alrick Brown’s Kinyarwanda, a project of the IFP Narrative Lab, opens today via the AFFRM and Visigoth Pictures, and I urge you all to see it. Brown has made an extraordinary and ambitious independent film that tackles one of the gravest subjects of the 20th century: the Rwandan genocide. He does so with an intimate, character-based approach, evoking details that add up to full, human picture of the conflict. Writes Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars

I thought I knew something about Rwanda, but I didn’t really know very much. I was moved by Hotel Rwanda (2004), but not really shaken this deeply. Not like this. After seeing Kinyarwanda, I have a different kind of feeling about the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The film approaches it not as a story line but as a series of intense personal moments.

Winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Kinyarwanda opens today in New York, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Seattle. For more, visit its website, and check out the trailer below.