More questions than answers

Rating: 5/10 (7 February 2009)

The west's terrible neglect of the Rwandan genocide is to our shame; but how did it happen? 'Hotel Rwanda' deserves credit for bringing this wrongly-ignored tragedy to our attention, albeit long after the killing; but it fails to really answer the question. A smooth, urbane hotel manager suddenly finds that half the country wants to kill the other half, and ends up trying to protect as many of his fellow citizens as follows. But the murderous violence comes out of nowhere, and perhaps cannot be truly understood through the perspective of a westernised member of the middle classes; and the widespread nature of the terror (a million people were killed in all) is not really captured. Although it's quite normal to personalise a story that seems too large to tell completely (think 'Schindler's List' for an obvious example), I found it hard to get a true sense of the wider society of which the hotel is supposed to be a microcosm (just as the one heroic U.N. officer we see appears equally without a context of his own). So while it's good this film was made, I found it only somewhat illuminating; though it also made me ponder how shamefully rarely black Africa is chosen as a subject for any sort of film.