Hotel Rwanda: Not a Paradise
Hollywood Shows Genocide Facts
By Christopher Neiger, 02.16.05

Hundreds of people crammed into the theaters in Virginia Beach, Va., last Friday night to see what Hollywood has to offer. Yet, only 15 people left their homes that night purposed to see “Hotel Rwanda.”

The film is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who helped save more than 1,200 fellow Rwandans during the genocides in 1994. In one hundred days nearly one million people were slaughtered because of their tribal background. It was a war between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, which began hundreds of years before, and exploded into three months of killing which left 800,000 Tutsis dead.

In the film, Paul is a suave manager of the Belgian-owned Hotel Des Mille Collines who lives by catering to the rich and powerful. He appeases military men with hard liquor and makes deals with the hotel food supplier only after he has first given the supplier a Cuban cigar.

All the relationships he has worked so hard to gain end up counting for nothing once the killing begins. Paul is from the Hutu tribe, which helps keep him safe at first, but his wife and other family members belong to the Tutsi tribe.

This movie shows little horrific violence or gory footage of the killings, yet it reveals enough to allow the viewers to visualize what is happening throughout the country.

Once the genocide begins, the rich--and mostly white--guests of the hotel leave to go back to their countries, while Paul turns the hotel into a refugee camp, though not entirely by his own choosing. Throughout the film Paul fights to keep himself, his family and others at the hotel alive. He makes all of the Hutu fighters believe that the hotel is still up and running with foreign guests.

With all of his efforts, Paul hopes that the United Nations and other countries will come to his aid and transport everyone at the hotel to safety. But he discovers that the Western world has ignored the genocide, and he is left alone.

One part of the movie shows a camera operator named Jack, (Joaquin Phoenix), filming massacres right down the road from the hotel. Paul hopes that the footage shown to the world will bring help, but Jack just says, “If people see this footage, they’ll say ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners.”

The film does a marvelous job of getting the viewer to realize the seriousness of genocide and how the world overlooked it, and to feel sorry for having done so. But it does more than shame us. It tells a short story of what happened in Rwanda, as if to give the rest of the world a second chance to know and learn from it.