In a Rwanda marked by violence, death and destruction, four women seek refuge in a storage basement under a kitchen and are forced to fight a war for life. Alanna Brown’s debut has audiences searching for hope and hanging on to the ropes of resilience as Annick (Eliane Umuhire), Jeanette (Charmaine Bingwa), Peyton (Ella Cannon) and Mutesi (Bola Koleosho) faced genocide. The film begins with Annick reading the pages of her diary recounting the days spent in the basement. “I feel my mind craving sleep,” she writes, transporting us to Rwanda in 1994.

Annick finds herself in the company of Mutesi, a Tutsi woman; Peyton, a white American visiting Rwanda on a Peace Corps-type mission; and Jeanette, a nun, in the storage basement of her home. For the next 98 minutes, viewers are locked in with the women and only get a breath of fresh air when François, Annick’s husband, opens the basement door to deliver food.

The camerawork, though comprised mostly of medium close-ups, never exhausts the audience with the ensemble’s performance. However, as time passes in the basement, a sense of disconnect with the characters begins, as their character arcs and dialogue fall into stereotypes, with the plot running like a well-oiled machine.

Though death hangs over all the women in the basement, Annick nurtures life in her womb, and such juxtapositions, while obvious, are heartwarming. Still, the viewer doesn’t have much to engage with.

At the very beginning, the four women share their problems; while some had miscarriages, others were raped or had to deal with their parents’ quarrels. The universality of pain in a woman’s existence seems to bind these women together in a brotherhood. Such an emotional denouement is monological and helps to soften the plot.

Although Mutesi is troublesome at first, she too is submissive because she went through pain as a woman. She says she doesn’t want to die of anger; the anger she harbors for the men who raped her and the women who stood in silence.

And from that moment, the four women embark on a journey of resilience. They take pleasure in mundane things, whether it’s drawing portraits of each other or learning to read English. Everyone is happy to Seeds of Love, Trees of Peace, a children’s book that Peyton carries in her bag; it is never revealed why the women love the book. Annick continues to name her child after the author of the book, but the story that inspired these women to carry on in the face of a crippling adversary remains unknown to the public.

The fleeting moments of love and intimacy that Annick shares with her husband François are marred by survival plans, announcements of the death of their neighbors and discussions about the food ration. They reaffirm that the greatest act of love in the face of death is to hope.

As the days go by in the basement, the women begin to have nightmares, hallucinations and suffocations. The horror continues and the women must endure their life in the basement for 81 days.

The film’s postscript notes that women in post-genocide Rwanda championed a campaign to heal the country. Today, Rwanda has the highest percentage of women appointed to government than any other country in the world. From hidden basements to parliament, Rwandan women demanded peace. The film sows the seeds of a moving narrative about the Rwandan genocide, however, it forgets to water them enough.

Trees of Peace is currently streaming on Netflix