Factual Error

Rating: 10/10 (23 September 2006)

Joaquin Phoenix can be seen several times during the movie holding his Betacam-Camera utterly wrong:
his left hand is on the lenses focus ring, which is basically right.
But his thumb is being on the upper side of the lenses, which would make it physically impossible to set the focus all the way through. He would severely hurt himself, trying to set the focus on close range, or the closest setting possible, if he did it the way displayed in the film.
A real cameraman would never hold his camera this way.
Apart from this error and a few very minor glitches, Hotel Ruanda is pretty close to what happened in the small African country in 1994. But then, in order to make the movie accessible for most people, the real horrors have been left out for most of it. I am still waiting for a movie on the terrible genocide, displaying some of the real horrors as they were.