Film-maker recreates the killing zones to reach beyond cliche of 'never again'

The executions will take place in the banana grove, the commander decides, and his men drag the refugees from the church down a grassy path, forcing the first batch, two dozen men and women, to kneel at the edge of a shallow grave.

The soldiers are armed but the killing this hot Kigali afternoon is to be done by their militia allies, the men in civilian clothes squatting in the shade with red-stained machetes.

Thousands died at this site during Rwanda's genocide in 1994, but this scene takes place almost a decade later. The grounds of Kigali's St Famille church have been turned into a set for a feature film to recreate the atrocity. Among the actors and crew are survivors - and possibly perpetrators - of the real massacre.

The production is part of a surge of films, books and plays coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the genocide. Unlike films about the Holocaust, which were made decades after the event, Rwanda's tragedy is recent enough to be re-enacted by those who lived it. A Hollywood film being shot in South Africa, entitled Hotel Rwanda, is using Tutsi refugees who fled the genocide as extras.

The film being shot in Kigali, Sometimes in April, has gone further by using former killing zones as sets, including St Famille, a red-brick Catholic church built by the Belgians in 1913. Authenticity is guaranteed - at the risk of opening wounds which have barely healed, if at all.

The main backer, the US cable television company Home Box Office, is treading carefully.

Psychologists are permanently on set and crew and cast are reminded that the armed men surrounding their church are just acting and that the blood on the walls is fake.

The sight of silicone corpses in a swamp overwhelmed one village woman who wandered on to the set and remembered the sight for real.

Extras kitted out as soldiers of the extremist Hutu regime or interahamwe militia death squads are not allowed off set in their costumes.

Jean-Luc Mbawshimana's family was killed here but he escaped. Now, for £12 a day, he plays a club-wielding militiaman. "It's better for me to be interahamwe," he said. "That's just theatre. But to be a victim, no. That would bring back too many memories."

The writer and director of Sometimes in April, Raoul Peck, hopes to educate audiences about genocide. "I want people to realise what happened and why," he said. "To go beyond the cliches of 'never again'."