The word is genocide

Rating: 8/10 (7 June 2009)

Yes genocide committed against Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994: almost one million dead. The authors of the massacre were the Hutu militiamen. A particular savage massacre including of children and women done chiefly with cutlasses. This is what this movie is about and it describes and shows the situation and the various acts of violence in a very realistic and convincing way. But this is also the story of a particularly courageous man, a Hutu hotel manager married to a Tutsi who, risking his own life and safety, sheltered in his hotel in Kigali more than 1,000 people of the Tutsi ethnic group thus saving their lives. A small parenthesis now to say that some ethnologists say that the differences between Hutus and Tutsis are much more social than ethnic. It was fomented by German and Belgian colonists during their respective rules of the countries of Rwanda and Burundi following the old maxim that to rule you must divide; the German colonists considered Hutus those natives who possessed more than ten cows or (and) had an European-like straight nose. Both groups had lived in peace till the arrival of Germans first and Belgians later and only after that and after the decolonization period they began to be at each other's throats with Hutus killing Tutsis in Rwanda and Tutsis killing Hutus in the neighbouring Burundi. But going back to the movie this is in fact a true story (in the sense that the narrated facts happened indeed) and told in a succession of revealing episodes, images and dialogues of great strength that don't put aside the clear responsibility of western powers who deliberately withdrew their troops and abandoned the victims to their doom betraying their mission of maintaining order and protecting innocent civilians. Also an excellent performance of the cast mainly of the principal protagonists such as the Hutu hotel manager, his Tutsi wife and the UN commander in charge of protecting the hotel with a ridiculous half a dozen troops or so but who, despite that, accomplishes his mission in a brave and gallant way (performed by Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo and the veteran Nick Nolte).