Movie with a message

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2005)

Like most ethnic conflicts around the world, the divisions in Rwanda between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis have long antecedents, in this case the invasion of the Rwanda highlands by the Tutsis from Ethiopia in the 15th century. However, it was Belgium - who ruled the country under a UN mandate from 1918 to 1961 - who institutionalised the discrimination by favouring Tutsis and introducing identity cards which specified the holders ethnic group. The spark which lit the tinder was the shooting down of the aircraft carrying the Hutu President on 6 April 1994. In the next 100 days, there was a ferocious outbreak of genocide orchestrated by the Interahamwe militia and sanctioned by the Hutu government in which around 800,000 mostly Tutsis were massacred while the world community failed to intervene. A decade later, a kind of collective guilt sees the release of no less than four films about these events, the most high profile being "Hotel Rwanda" which garnered three Academy Award nominations.
Portraying death on this scale in a work of 'entertainment' almost demands that we observe the savagery through the prism of selected individuals and, in this case, Irish writer and director Terry George has chosen to use the real-life experience of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina and his family. Rwanda is often called 'Le pays des Milles Collines' (the Land of a Thousand Hills) and Paul worked at the Sabena-owned Hotel des Mille Collines, a four-star establishment in the capital of Kigali. A well-educated Hutu, he was married to a Tutsi and had three young children, so he was geographically and ethnically at the heart of the madness. Like a kind of Oskar Schindler, he used a mixture of simple bribery and his sharp wits, together with charm and even obsequiousness, to create a haven in the horror that enabled 1,268 mainly Tutsis to survive.
America actor Don Cheadle, who played a cockney fool in "Ocean's Eleven" & "Ocean's Twelve", gives a powerful and textured performance here which marks him out as someone who is going to become an A-list star, while able British actress Sophie Okonedo is his wife Tatiana (Tutsis are lighter-skinned and finer-featured), and it is such a change to see the leading roles in a movie taken by black actors. The fear and powerlessness of the hotel occupants - over a thousand men, women and children crammed into a 113-room establishment - is well created and sustained. The settings are very realistic, being largely shot in Johannesburg, and most of the technical and support crew were African. The focus of the action is the hotel itself and the violence is deliberately understated and left largely to the imagination.
While one does not wish to see killing portrayed gratuitously, this artistic decision runs the risk that a largely ignorant western audience fails to appreciate the true nature and scale of this machete-fuelled rampage of rape and murder but, this reservation aside, "Hotel Rwanda" is an important and worthy work that should serve as a political warning of the price of international inaction in the face of ethnic conflict. Paul Rusesabagina, now lives in Belgium with his family, and recently told the US "People" magazine: "What happened in Rwanada is now happening in Darfur, in the Congo, in all of these places they are butchering innocent civilians. It is high time we know that a human life in Africa is as important as a human life in the west."