You can check out, but you can never leave

Hotel Rwanda

I've covered Rwanda in detail before, but recent filmic events bring me back here. To the deaths of a million people, and the ways in which we turned our backs.

Films about genocide are never exactly lightweight farce. The trick, it seems, is to find a human story, one where the trailer voiceover guy can say "In a time of war, one man could stand up, and be a hero". The Schindler's List trick, we might say. Hope amongst insanity. Rwanda is humanity's darkest moment of the past half century. We in the West believed it was somebody else's problem, an African tribal conflict, but really it was one of the final absurd death rattles of colonialism. The one modicum of hope to be found by writer director Terry George, screenwriter of In the Name of the Father, was in the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, and the 1200 lives he saved.

Paul, Don Cheadle, is the manager at the Hotel Milles Collines, the Rwandan outpost of a Belgian hotel chain. He's learned how to play the Western game, to grease wheels with good scotch and beer. He knows that a man values a 10,000 franc cigar more than he values 10,000 francs. These are important things amidst the gun-ridden corruption in Sub-Saharan africa. As a Hutu, he is not in immediate danger from the insanity slowly rising up around him. He sees the warning signs, but he looks away - his family are what's important. His Tutsi family.

As the conflict escalates, Paul takes his extended family to the hotel for protection. While the tiny UN force does everything in its power - absolutely nothing - to stop the spread of massacre, to stop the hatred being disseminated over the air and manifested in murder, more people come to Paul's hotel, in fear of their lives. He hides them. Paul believes the West will save them when they see the images on the news.

Surprise, they don't. A drug-addled American cameraman played fantastically by Joaquin Phoenix, wants to go out and film footage of the massacres, but his BBC reporter counterpart refuses to leave the hotel, demands that his air conditioning remains running. He's seen this before, he knows the drill. They're here til they evacuate.

International forces arrive, guns in hand, to evacuate the Westerners. They forcibly keep Rwandans off the buses. They are being abandoned. Close the doors and let them fight it out. We learn, with Paul, what the West truly cares about. A blood curdlingly dejected, whisky-soaked speech from Nick Nolte's head of UN forces, a composite character based mainly on Dallaire, hits home the point of the film - to the West, the Rwandans are less than black, they are African. As Paul says,

"I am a fool. They told me I was one of them and I. . .the wine, chocolates, cigars, style. . .I swallowed all of it and they handed me their shit. I have no history. I have no memory. I am a fool."

Paul's hotel is now a refugee camp, and the last safe refuge for the tutsi in Kigali. He'll have to use everything he's ever learned about manipulating power to keep these people safe. Until somebody, until please god somebody, puts an end to this genocide.

The conflict itself takes a secondary position here to the human story, but when we are reminded of it, it is brutally. Blood, massacre, that icky feeling that we know what those bumps in the road they are driving over in the fog really are. I've read more about this conflict than most, probably, but still found myself overwhelmed by the pain of the story. The three people I saw this film with had the same reaction - at first the acting seemed forced, the dialogue stilted, the direction pedestrian. But by the half-way point, we had tears in our eyes, we couldn't bear the tension, we felt strange combinations of shock and shame. That's what happens when you, as a human, one who saw it on the television and continued to eat your dinner, are confronted with Rwanda.

Cheadle's performance is every bit worth his Oscar nomination, possibly the finest moment in what is already an impressive career of fine performances. Sophie Okonedo, so radiant in Dirty Pretty Things, as his wife Tatiana, brings quiet dignity and strength to her role as Paul's reason for living. Nolte manages to channel the uselesness and fatalism, but good intention, of the entire United Nations forces, into a single body. You sense his internal horror at his powerlessness, how much he deeply wants to help, how much he knows he can't.

Hotel Rwanda is obviously not a fun film - it is peppered with humour, of course, and zips along with enough explosions and action and gun waving to entertain most audiences, but it's undeniably the story of a genocide. One it's easier not to watch. One we can feel so much better not watching. It didn't happen if you didn't see it. For its flaws, for its ordinary direction, this film may not be perfect, but its still one of the finest you'll see all year, and certainly one of the most important. George says that the film is not about the ghosts of Rwanda, but it is for them.

This review was originally broadcast on RTRfm