Year: 2004
Director: Terry George
Country: Canada
Language: English
The Rwandan genocide was the mass slaughter of a social/ethnic class called the Tutsi caused by the Hutu majority in 1994. The widespread murder killed over a million Rwandans, 70% of the Tutsi population, over a 100 day period. When the genocide ended over 2 million Rwandans were displaced and became refugees.
The film Hotel Rwanda is about Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), a hotel manager who housed over a thousand Tutsi refugees during their struggle against the Hutu militia in Rwanda.
Hotel Rwanda succeeds in conveying human tragedy on a scale that is both vast and intimate. The magnitude of the horror outside the hotel compound is presented only in glimpses, such as Rusesbagina stumbling upon a road of corpses, but these glimpses give quite an adequate frame of the ongoing madness and butchery. Dead is ever-present. Time and time again our "heroes" escape horrifying situations by the skin of their teeth.
Unfortunately the film lacks a bold political statement, albeit Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte) does give an angered line about how Europeans view Rwandans as "not even good enough to be n**gers". The real tragedy of Rwanda is how many lives were needlessly lost because Europeans & Americans wouldn't bother intervening. I suppose because the history was fairly recent, Director Terry George doesn't want to step on too many feet.
The politics are soft-pedaled, as the picture focuses more on the perseverance of the hotel owner rather than the short-comings of powerful nations. Hotel Rwanda needed a big message to be considered "great". Still, the straightforward narrative regarding the genocide is powerful and, by never sensationalizing each moment, holds a tremendous amount of truth.
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