TV: Hotel Rwanda
Authors: Chloe Veltman
Journal: BMJ (2005)

About halfway through Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina, a hotelier and the central character in the film, steps out of a van that has been run off the road in thick fog one morning, to find himself nose to nose with a corpse. Stumbling to his feet in the swirling mist, he realises that he is staring not just at one cadaver but a landscape strewn with lifeless, bloodied bodies.

More than 10 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800 000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu Rwandans were methodically hunted down and murdered by government-backed Hutu extremists, while the international community—favouring economic policies over humanitarian principles—failed to intervene. Today, Rwanda is still reeling from the impact of the disaster, particularly from a healthcare perspective. An Amnesty International report published last April estimated that between a quarter and half a million women were subject to rape—including gang rape, sexual torture, and mutilation—during the Rwandan genocide, and that of those who survived, seven in ten are now living with HIV/AIDS. A study by Physicians for Human Rights, meanwhile, reports widespread mental trauma among child survivors at refugee camps.​camps.




Figure 1





Hotel Rwanda: a commanding critique of the West's absence from the scene of the crime

Credit: UNITED ARTISTS




While films such as last year's revelatory PBS documentary Ghosts of Rwanda (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/) examine, with broad strokes, the social, political, and diplomatic failures that enabled the genocide to occur, George's equally potent cinematic account of the events of April to June 2004 tells a more personal story. Don Cheadle stars as Rusesabagina, the manager of a Belgian-owned four-star hotel in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, who helped save the lives of more than a thousand refugees and orphans during the conflict. As the real-life drama unfolds, we watch Rusesabagina transform from an impeccably dressed, highly professional hotelier whose chief concerns are the wellbeing of his family and the preservation of his livelihood, to a sort of latterday Noah, sheltering Rwanda's persecuted masses in an unlikely Ark, the elegant Hotel des Milles Collines.

The most compelling effect of focusing a film about the Rwandan genocide on one individual and his immediate environment derives not from the burning buildings, corpse lined roads, and machete wielding youths that we see on screen, but from what we don't see. In a film about a human crisis that led to giant levels of death and disease, George's coverage of living conditions and healthcare is wilfully vague. The viewer only gets a hint of the vast scope of the crimes committed against women with a passing shot of a group of naked females huddled behind bars in a corner of a Hutu military base; other similarly brief scenes show refugees at the hotel drinking swimming pool water when the fresh water supply runs out, an infant with a life threatening fever, and starving and sick people crowding into every available corner of the once stylish hotel. Yet George offers little in response to the victims' physical and mental suffering. A solitary Red Cross worker, overstretched and under-resourced, makes only sporadic appearances. There's a short scene at a makeshift Red Cross hospital near the end. And that's about it.

Early on in the movie, Westerners are evacuated from Rwanda. Aid is blocked. Peacekeeping forces and journalists pull out. The outside (occidental) world disappears almost completely from view as the hotel and its inhabitants struggle to survive without the help of mediating forces. It is precisely from this pervading sense of lack that Hotel Rwanda derives its power. With its gaping holes and loaded silences, George's film is a commanding critique of the Western world's absence from the scene of the crime.