Hotel Rwanda, Terry George’s 2004 film about the Rwandan genocide, is caught in a situation with other genocide films that leads to some viewers to object to it while others are strongly drawn to it and everything between these two extremes. That situation is one where some find that the film fictionalizes and understates its events whereas others find that it represents a gateway through which the audience learns more about the relatively overlooked genocide in Rwanda. In order to make this film effective and reach an audience of reasonable scale, history had to be changed; the only question is how much had to be altered.Terry George altered the history enough to produce a movie that received critical acclaim but sacrificed historical and political context surrounding the Rwandan Genocide.
The film altered the historical context by utilizing a hero-style narrative to a necessary extent. Hotel Rwanda follows Paul Rusesabagina from a few days before the genocide begins until his escape from the war zone four months later. Rusesabagina is originally depicted as a man with sentiments only to his family and the guests at the hotel he manages, the Hotel des Mille Collines.When the genocide against the Tutsis begins, Paul is not as concerned as one would expect.
He is positive that Westerners will come and quickly put an end to the violence. In the meantime, he shelters Tutsis from the ruthless Interhamwe, who are trying to eradicate them. When on a return trip from collecting supplies for the hotel, Paul cannot figure out why the road is suddenly covered with bumps and dips that have never been there before. Through the morning fog, he cannot see what has happened.When he inspects the road, he discovers that the bumps he had been hitting are actually bodies of victims of genocide victims. About this time, the U.
N. orders the recall of most of its troops and the evacuation of all westerners. Paul is informed by Colonel Oliver, head of the U. N. peace keepers that the U. N.
and western nations are not going to intervene. He blackmails the leader of the Rwandan army, General Bizimungu, with threats of testifying to war crimes and as such enlists his help.Soon, however, the remaining U. N. peacekeepers set up a convoy and load the refugees from the hotel into it. This convoy drives across the front into land controlled by the rebelling Tutsis.
Paul is shown leaving with his family from a refugee camp that appears safe and calm. After watching Hotel Rwanda, I did not get the feeling I should have considering I had just learned of a genocide that I had otherwise no knowledge about. The only information I had was what my professor had told me and until then I didn’t even know there was genocide in Rwanda only a decade and a half ago.Before doing any research beyond the film, I assumed the conflict in Rwanda was not too bad because I’d never heard of it until that point and the film didn’t give much of a scope about the extent of the genocide.
Essentially, all I knew after watching the film is that there was a civil war turned genocide in a Central African country sparked by the Hutu’s hatred of the Tutsis. I had no frame of reference as to why the Hutu’s hated the Tutsis or what even separated the two.The lack of political and historical context definitely led me to believe that this conflict was always brewing and had simply just boiled over at this particular point. Where the film did have an effect on me was the depiction of the uncaring Western world. If genocide is being committed somewhere, it is not only an American obligation as a world superpower to intervene, but a U. N.
obligation to put a stop to it. The portrayal of the abandonment angered me more than any other film or article that attacks the West. It actually altered my attitude towards foreign intervention because it was so moving.Katrina Onstad, an arts writer for CBC, felt the movie did not portray the Rwandan genocide as truthfully as it could have, but that it was a necessary evil, so to speak.
She writes that “the specificity of what went on in Rwanda is, in a way, lost in the generic category ‘genocide film’” (1). By saying this, she means that Hotel Rwanda follows the same basic plotline and event structure as most other genocide films. She further illustrates her point when she compares the scene where Paul is driving and discovers the “stacks of dead bodies” to “uncannily similar climactic moments” in The Killing Fields, Life is Beautiful, and Kundun, three other genocide films with unrelated genocides (1).She goes on to sympathize with Terry George, who both wrote and directed the film, by identifying that there is indeed a “complicated morality of making art out of atrocity” (1).
Onstad means to address the question of creating and exhibiting art that depicts genocide or similarly heinous crises. In other words, she is saying that the altering of truths around genocide will be taken by some as downplaying the events and the morality surrounding doing so will be questioned.By acknowledging the moral burden that can come from filming a movie such as Hotel Rwanda, Onstad cuts George some slack, so to speak, by saying that she understands his challenge. She goes on to say that “for a film about genocide to succeed” there must be “a balance” in which audiences “accept, even embrace, the compromise… but they also require some nod to the unshowable reality of the situation” (4). This quote demonstrates Onstad’s main point: There be a balance between entertainment of audiences and factual informing of the same audiences no matter how gruesome it may need to be and Hotel Rwanda achieved that balance.
My reactions to the film closely line up with those of Katrina Onstad concerning the historical inaccuracies. Both she and I saw the film and realized that it may not have been the greatest at giving the context surrounding the genocide in Rwanda, however it was necessary to use a changed history in order to produce a film that would sell. Onstad said that films with historical backdrops such as this must find the balance between historical accuracy and entertainment value, but I thought the film could have had slightly more historical accuracy and context.She says that the film became unfortunately lost in the realm of the “genocide film” despite depicting events that were decidedly different from any other genocide which is more in line with how I reacted to the film.
She acknowledges that creating a film about such a hateful subject is difficult because of the moral dilemma surrounding its depiction. Hotel Rwanda’s strength lies in the depiction of Western abandonment of the Rwandans during a time of dire need. It does not give the proper context for the beginning of the genocide, however it demonstrates the changes that the genocide caused among the Rwandans affected on both sides of the machete.As Onstad suggests, future genocide films should not get caught in the web of typical, genocide film plotline but rather break away and balance the historic truths with fictionalizing (4). Fletcher illustrates that the film served a greater purpose by “bringing the issue into public discourse” (22). Fletcher summarizes that the film, despite historical inaccuracies and lack of context, reached an audience wider than other movies about the Rwandan Genocide.
