profoundly moving

Rating: 9/10 (12 October 2008)

Paul Rusesabagina is the human face of a conflict the West chose to ignore. In ages that pre-date multimedia, conflicts like this occurred and were forgotten because no one took the time to chronicle them. Our consciences no longer have that luxury. Nor, however, do we feel any moral compulsion to action. Especially when it comes to Africa. The continent is, after all, the heart of darkness, and we choose to believe that evil deeds that take place there are beyond our comprehension or powers to intervene.
Hotel Rwanda gives the lie to that myth by showing the human faces of the genocide that took place. Rusesabagina's initial prevarication is admissible with the benefit of hindsight. Most of us, in similar circumstances, would choose 'not to get involved.' As filmcraft Hotel Rwanda excels by telling an African story. Nick Nolte is good as a compromised UN General, but it is Cheadle who shines brightest as a man called to act in a way nothing he has done previously suggests he can. This is not Africa through the prism of the white man's eyes. Africans commit, Africans fail to act, and Africans rise above in an African conflict. The West is complicit, historically and contemporaneously, but responsibility for the horrific acts that are let loose ultimately belong to Africans. As do the plaudits for the heroism.
Hotel Rwanda is an important film, a fine film, that humanises and lays prosaic an ugly chapter in recent human history few of us chose to contemplate or condemn. Tense, shocking and cathartic in equal measure, it will live to do for the Rwandan conflict what The Killing Fields did for Cambodia.