As the first feature length film covering the Rwandan genocide, Hotel Rwanda had the opportunity to contextualise the genocide and act as an informative piece of work.

Instead, the producers choose to focus on the drama of one individuals attempt to save a group of people. Thereby they made the film more commercially acceptable. In doing so the truth is compromised and an opportunity missed.

Hotel Rwanda is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), house manager at the luxurious Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, who used his position and influence to save the lives of nearly 1300 victims who had sought refuge at the hotel during the Rwandan genocide.

In what many rank as the most horrifying episode in African history, an estimated 800,000 people, mainly Tutsi, were massacred by their Hutu countrymen in little more than three months between April and July 1994.

Most victims were hacked to death with machetes, spiked clubs or farming implements. A unique and disturbing feature of the Rwandan genocide was widespread popular participation in the killing.

A further 500,000 people died as a result of disease, famine and military action. While over 2,000,000 Hutus fled to neighbouring countries for fear of reprisals when a Tutsi-dominated government was installed by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that took control of the country in July 1994.

These casualty figures are enormous if one considers that the population of Rwanda was in the region of 7,000,000 at the start of the genocide and that Tutsis formed about fifteen per cent or just over one million of this total.

At the start of the film, Rusesabagina is depicted as a suave, stylish man. Through a combination of deference, flattery and canny bribery consciously he stores up favours with the rich and powerful and, through his charm and resourcefulness manages to keep the hotel’s clientele happy.

Although Hotel Rwanda is well-intentioned and is moving, even potent, in parts, it has serious flaws and its execution is at times below par. A central weakness of Hotel Rwanda is that the film makes little more than a cursory attempt to explain why the genocide happened or to sketch the political and historical context in which it unfolded.

The film instead focuses on the intense drama around Paul Rusesabagina’s heroic attempts to save his charges. The choice of a strong dramatic centre clearly did not preclude director, Terry George, from also providing sufficient background to make the slaughter more comprehensible to viewers because the film carries a lot of flab.

Simply replacing some of the superfluous and repetitious scenes, especially those involving a frightened and tearful Tatiana, with ones clarifying some of the complexities of the Rwandan situation would have gone a long way toward achieving this objective.

Appropriate contextualization would thus have helped strengthen the flaccid plot line and improved the coherence of the film. This disembodiment of Rusesabagina’s story from the complexity of its context deprives the film of much of its power to provoke, enlighten or simply to raise critical questions.

More importantly, being the first feature-length offering with mass appeal on the genocide, it would not be unfair to regard the film as having some duty to inform, perhaps even educate, viewers to a greater extent than it does. Some people might think that this places an unfair burden on the film-makers but one could argue that Hotel Rwanda is, after all, not a movie viewers are likely to want to see purely for entertainment.

This is not to advocate an overt didacticism but to ask for better contextualisation. Hotel Rwanda’s simplistic approach to the genocide is, in my opinion, more likely to perpetuate than dispel stereotypes of Africa as a place of senseless violence and roiling tribal animosities.

The absence of a well-founded explanation of the genocide is bound to result in many viewers falling back on shop worn, racist conventions of Western attitudes toward Africa. Indeed, the film inadvertently reinforces such mystification. When Dube (Desmond Dube) asks Rusesabagina how such cruelty could be possible, Paul simply replies, ‘Hatred… insanity’, as if the mass killing defies logical explanation.

The failure to contextualise the story properly is symptomatic of a wider problem, namely, the director and script-writers’ flawed commercial strategy for dealing with the challenge of representing the extreme violence of the Rwandan genocide.

Terry George’s overall approach may be summed up as one of evading the key issues at stake in the Rwandan genocide. As Keith Turan, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, very neatly put it; ‘One of the ways filmmakers have traditionally tried to make unpleasant scenarios more palatable to audiences is by changing the focus from the awfulness of events to individual acts of bravery, from the complicity of the many to the heroism of the few. Hotel Rwanda saw the opportunity to take this path and did not hesitate’ (Cape Times, 2005).

Many viewers will have been enticed into seeing the movie in the expectation of gaining insight into one of the most heinous crimes of the recent past. Instead they come away with little real insight but a formulaic story about the triumph of the human spirit in which the focus is diverted from the dire human cost of the carnage and the troubling questions it raises, to the noble actions of a single hero.

In celebrating the relatively minor triumph of Rusesabagina’s extraordinary courage, Hotel Rwanda promotes a simplistic morality of good conquering evil and has little of substance to offer by way of elucidating why the greater evil of the Rwandan genocide was possible in the first instance.

This is not to criticise Hotel Rwanda for focusing on an individual, for individual experiences can indeed be a most effective vehicle for illuminating broader social, even global, experiences and truths. The trick in doing this successfully is to bring into a simultaneous frame of reference localized detail and broader social structures and experience.

Hotel Rwanda fails to do this through a lack of proper contextualisation of its subject matter and choosing to focus on a set of experiences that were atypical of the Rwandan genocide. Rusesabagina may well have succeeded in saving all of the refugees at the Milles Collines Hotel but we can’t ignore that about 80 per cent of the internal Tutsi population succumbed in the genocide.

This is also not in the least to argue that the film is not justified in reinforcing the optimistic message that the actions of individuals of conscience can make a big difference, even in the face of overwhelming odds and the most abominable evils imaginable. After all, like its most obvious parallel, Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda is based on a true story and the real-life Rusesabagina deserves to be lauded for his bravery, his integrity and his altruism.

But to communicate this message as ineptly as Hotel Rwanda does, represents a missed opportunity to disseminate a cogent understanding of the Rwandan genocide to an expectant world-wide viewership which has had little opportunity of grappling with the meaning of this atrocity through the popular media.

Given its box-office strategy it should not come as any surprise that Hotel Rwanda deliberately shies away from realistic representations of the violence perpetrated during the Rwandan genocide. In an interview in Johannesburg to promote the movie Terry George answered critics of his evasion of graphic violence by making clear that; ‘… there was no way I was going to shoot a bloodfest film with people being hacked to death with machetes... I set out to create a political entertainment story rather than a pornographic depiction of the terror and violence’ (Sunday Times, 2005).

So the only actual killing one sees is a short, indistinct sequence of people being hacked by machete, filmed at a distance and replayed on a tiny television screen by members of the news crew stationed at the Milles Collines.

For the rest, the slaughter is presented indirectly. For example, a few corpses are strewn about the front gardens of houses and Rusesabagina’s blood spattered son serves as evidence of the murder of one of his neighbours.

The high point of horror in the movie does not show actual killing. It occurs when Paul and Gregoire (Tony Kgoroge) encounter the victims of a massacre after being deliberately sent along the ‘river road’ by George Rutaganda. Driving along, their van suddenly seems to hit an exceptionally bumpy and deeply rutted stretch. Thinking that they had strayed from the road, Paul gets out of the vehicle only to fall onto mutilated bodies that had been left lying in their path. The camera then pans upwards to reveal corpses carpeting the outstretched thoroughfare in the gathering light.

Depicting mass violence in ways that do not diminish its reality for the viewer yet do not denigrate victims or trivialize the pain of survivors is one of the core challenges movie-makers of genocide face. Films about mass violence will always raise vexing questions about the ethics of creating entertainment out of mass murder, of appropriate ways of commercializing atrocity, of engaging viewers with visual representations of unspeakable cruelty without desensitizing or alienating them.

Finding a balance between these sorts of tensions lie at the heart of making feature films about genocide. The specific circumstances of the Rwandan genocide demands a degree of engagement with human depravity and mass violence that is lacking in Hotel Rwanda. Terry George gets the balance wrong. There is too much heroism and too little horror in Hotel Rwanda, too much romanticism and too little reality.

Hotel Rwanda has a decided tendency to understate the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and even to romanticize aspects of the story it tells. This is mostly due to a box-office strategy that seeks to make the genocide more tolerable to a mass audience. It is, however, also partly a result of trying to communicate an optimistic message about the ultimate triumph of human benevolence and partly a product of the decision to focus on a case that is unrepresentative of the Rwandan catastrophe.

The tendency for romanticism is nowhere more marked than in the clumsy wrapping up of the story at the end of the film. The improbable saving of the UN convoy from an Interahamwe mob through a fortuitous RPF ambush is inept and the subsequent depiction of an all too orderly refugee camp with its all too ample medical facilities is a good example of the movie’s tendency to underplay the wretchedness of the Rwandan situation. Most conspicuously, however, the film succumbs to a cloying sentimentality with its conventionally Hollywood ending.

Hotel Rwanda could, however, have done a far better job, given the constraints of the medium and the opportunities offered by the Rusesabagina story, of informing a receptive audience about the Rwandan holocaust and of raising consciousness about the scourge of genocide.

The feature film is an extremely powerful medium and the Rwandan genocide a potentially explosive issue but Hotel Rwanda comes nowhere close to fully exploiting their potential.

* Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

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