It was an interesting end to my film viewing day. Here again, Terry George's ability for bringing clarity to an impossible subject mired in chaos takes center stage. Terry George captured the violence of genocide in unexpected ways introducing it's promise right from the beginning of the film when a crate of machetes are dropped in a warehouse where they spill onto the floor.
Hotel Rwanda is a subject no one believed would find the silver screen. The stark reality of living within a genocide was more than anyone watching the film expected. The actual reality is that the bloodiness of the genocide was not nearly witnessed in this film so much as preceived. In one scene, Don Cheadle (click on) in his roll as the hotel manager, is a passenger in a truck taking supplies back to the hotel traveling in a fog along a familiar road they were reassured was 'clear' when he starts yelling to stop the truck as he believed they were off the road because of the very bumpy traverse. When he gets out of the truck to see how far off the road they were he steps on bodies. For as far as the eye could see there were bodies strewn across the road and in the jungle lining the road. In fact, the truck he was traveling was now standing on bodies and not the road surface. It was a horrifying, bloodless scene to the eyes but to the emotions it was as bloody a scene as I have ever witnessed.
The horror of Rwanda's genocide could not be captured on film entirely, no one would be able to sit through the film. Terry George's ability to bring that horror to an acceptable level for the civilized mind is the reason I find myself attending so many of his films. It is a film I will not readily forget. It left me feeling stronger in my values and more committed than ever to non-violent and vigilent resolutions. I stress vigilant as that is the place where the impetus lies and where the violence is still preventable. Once it begins, diplomacy has failed. Although diplomacy will be 'the end' of the violence what happens between is a result of failed programs to avert the imputus to the killing. It is frankly honest analysis that is required to bring proper programs and funding with effective use of that funding without corruption that stops such inconceivable cruelty.
The Rwanda Genocide was bigotry. Simple as that. Someone wanted power they didn't have and they chose to kill anyone along the way that wasn't their ethnicity to get it. The most interesting statement made by Nick Nolte, the leader of the UN peacekeepers, was "We are peacekeepers, not peacemakers." Nothing is more true. Nothing should be more expected than that either. War is not the place for the United Nations.
