By Wendy Marinaccio

Los Altos native Paul Freedman and some Rwandan children review video footage he taped for a documentary he produced. The filmmaker recently won a Peabody Award for his work.

The documentary film “Rwanda: Do Scars Ever Fade?”, directed, edited, produced and co-written by Los Altos native Paul Freedman, received a Peabody Award May 16 and will compete for several Emmy Awards Sept. 18. The film, first televised Dec. 19 on The History Channel, was created 10 years after the genocide in Rwanda. Approximately 75 percent of the country’s Tutsi minority population - an estimated 800,000 people - were killed within 100 days in 1994.

“I wanted to put a personal face on what happened,” Freedman said. “You hear these numbers like ‘800,000 Rwandans,’ and it’s just a big number. You don’t feel anything.”

The Peabody Awards are among the most prestigious and most difficult to achieve in the categories of broadcast journalism, documentary film, educational programming and entertainment. This year 32 awards were presented.

The call informing Freedman of the award came April 7, coincidentally the date of the 11th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. “Rwanda: Do Scars Ever Fade?” has been nominated for two Emmy Awards in the categories of Best Long Form Documentary and Best Music and Sound Design. A previous film Freedman edited won Documentary of the Year from the International Documentary Association.

“Rwanda: Do Scars Ever Fade?” is the first documentary film Freedman has directed, but he said serving as the editor on a documentary prepares one for directing because it offers a unique opportunity to put one’s signature on a film.

“In a documentary, even if you know it’s going to be about basketball in a gymnasium, you don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s up to the editor to figure out how to put it together in a cohesive narrative,” he said.

Freedman has been working in film in Los Angeles since 1984, when he started as a driver at a film company.

“It’s a long road,” he said. He grew up in Los Altos, worked as a Los Altos Town Crier paper boy and went to Los Altos High School.

His mother, Betty Freedman, a 41-year resident of Los Altos, traveled to Los Angeles for a screening of the documentary and met survivors of the genocide.

“I thought it was excellent,” she said. “He did a beautiful job.”

She said the survivors in attendance “felt that it was very well-done and authentic.”

To create the film, Freedman visited Rwanda in February 2004 with a digital camera and a production manager. He then outlined the film and returned to Rwanda in March and April of 2004 with a cinematographer.

“I found these incredibly deep, expressive, loving people, who survived and perpetuated these atrocities,” Freedman said. “There are only seven or eight million people (remaining), and probably two million are guilty of genocide. The survivors are very generous and very willing to talk about what happened.”

“It will ruin your day,” Freedman said of watching the film because a viewer is put face-to-face with the genocide.

“It’s a thing that’s in everybody - it’s in me, it’s in you,” he said. “There’s no happy ending in Rwanda, even 10 or 11 years later.”

His goal is for people to walk away from the film “ashamed that they were part of the international community of bystanders.”

Next week, Freedman will return to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to support an upcoming project about Rwandans serving with the African Union troops in the Darfur region of Sudan, site of an ongoing genocide.