Dydine Umunyana was born in Rwanda in 1990. She was four years old when the Genocide Against the Tutsi began in April 1994. She survived. Most of her family did not.

The years that followed were years of rebuilding — of self, of family, of country. Rwanda was doing something the world had rarely witnessed: choosing to face what had happened rather than bury it. And Dydine, growing up inside that reckoning, came to understand something that would shape everything she would later build.

By her early twenties, Dydine had found her medium: film. Not film as entertainment, but film as testimony — a way for women who had survived extraordinary things to speak, and be heard, on their own terms.

In 2012, she founded Umbrella Cinema Promoters in Kigali — a nonprofit dedicated to training young Rwandan women filmmakers, giving them the tools of the craft and, more importantly, the space to tell their own stories.

Umbrella Cinema Promoters did not offer theory. It offered training — intensive, 15-day programs in scriptwriting, directing, cinematography, and editing — designed for young Rwandan women between the ages of 15 and 30, coming from all four provinces of Rwanda.

There were no fees. Every session was funded through grants and partnerships, because the work was built on a simple conviction: financial capacity should never determine whose story gets told.

Over seven years, Umbrella Cinema Promoters trained more than 20 young women filmmakers, awarded certificates of completion, and established itself as a leading production organization in Rwanda — working on local, national, and international co-productions.

The official launch at Kigali Serena Hotel on March 24, 2013 was not a small gathering. It was a signal: this work mattered.

When Dydine relocated to the United States, she carried everything Umbrella Cinema Promoters had taught her — about what it means to train someone to tell their own story, about what changes in a room when a woman speaks her truth, about the relationship between testimony and healing.

And she began asking a new question. Not just: how do we train women to tell stories on film? But: what happens when those stories reach the rooms that need them most? What happens when a survivor speaks to a high school student who has never heard the word genocide applied to a living person? What happens when a law enforcement officer truly listens — for the first time outside of a crisis?

In 2020, Dydine and her husband Alex Anderson — a filmmaker and creative director — co-founded Kind Kulture in Los Angeles, registered as Umuco Love, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The name carried everything forward: umuco — the Kinyarwanda word for a person who is kind, loving, and a true member of their community. W'urukundo: of love.

In five years, Kind Kulture has grown from a Los Angeles storytelling organization into a platform operating across continents and inside some of the world's most important institutions.

More than 100,000 students reached. Eight years of law enforcement and community dialogue in Los Angeles. Programs in four countries. A Spanish edition of Dydine's memoir launched at the Bogotá International Book Fair. Testimony delivered at Kwibuka 2025 — the official annual commemoration of the Genocide Against the Tutsi — alongside the Rwandan diaspora community in Los Angeles.

And now: The Center for Human Dignity — Los Angeles. Kind Kulture's long-term vision for a permanent cultural institution preserving survivor testimony and advancing human dignity through storytelling, education, and art.

The work that began with 20 young women in Kigali is still the same work. It has simply grown into what it was always meant to become.