Hotel Rwanda

Recently, a friend mentioned watching this film, which prompted this post.



I saw Hotel Rwanda last year while I was in Kinshasa, after our IT geek friend obligingly pirated it -- a bunch of us sat around in the living room of a huge USAID house, which overlooked a veranda and an in-ground pool, and watched it with a glass of expensive scotch or a bottle of local Skol or Primus in hand.

It was odd to be in Kinshasa, close enough to the action, or the idea or representation of it based on the constant threat of riots and violence there, and to see the film after I had already lived in Rwanda myself and visited a church or two that were massacre sites. I have a photo in storage somewhere of a table full of skulls, all lined up in rows by surviving family members who care for the church property now.

This church was not the site where the government had preserved the bodies with lime, but they were still involved in a struggle to legally access the remains of their family members.

Everywhere, there was plenty of evidence of what had transpired to feed the imagination -- holes in the church walls from grenades, piles of possessions that people had brought when they sought refuge there, bones sorted and categorized, identity cards laying in dust on benches. Some of the skulls wore scarves on their head or were small enough to be identified as infants, and in many you could determine the cause of death -- some were crushed, some had a crack caused by a machete, and some had a weapon still protruding from them.

At the time, I thought: Hotel Rwanda is a good movie for those who don't know anything about what happened there. It was well done, but for the unrealistic but requisite Happy Ending. It starred both actors recognizable to Westerners and Rwandans. There was a tight story line and all of the important factors were there: ethnic strife, UN presence, radio communications exacerbating the murderous fervor, inadequate outside intervention, the dread that accompanied each realization that slowly people were becoming trapped, footage of Interahamwe parading through the streets with machetes shouting slogans, neighbors disappearing.

Somehow, though, it didn't adequately convey the horror. There were enough hints to let the viewer know what was happening, but just barely. I do not support gratuitous violent imagery. But the gravity of the event -- I don't know, somehow I thought there should have been more. I wanted the realism, I wanted everyone else to see what I had seen and imagined and heard about from colleagues and read about in my feverish consumption of available literature (We wish to inform you...; Season of Blood; Speak, Rwanda. I wanted people to be more horrified, perhaps to make up for the fact that many of them had been ignorant of all these events for ten years.

Then I figured that I would just wait for Sometimes in April to come out, because surely that would be more of a documentary and less romantic, not being based on the story of one Hero. One day, my friend's husband brought it home from Blockbuster.

We had that thing sitting in the DVD player till it was overdue, and none of us could bear to press PLAY.