What will be your response if someone say excepting you all of your relatives gonna die? you will be well paid but first kill your wife, child & friends. Its not the fact how good, well wisher, polite & humane they are, fact is that they are not of our mentality & group. Is it possible to accept this offer by a person having humanity in mind? To justify all these circumstances one must visit to the lobby of Hotel Rwanda.
Recently people are very much concerned about what will happen if nature destroys our world, what will we do if something like Tsunami or Aila visit us again? (you may know the total number of dead were more than 139000 in Tsunami)
Now imagine 800,000 dead in 100 days, but this slaughter caused by human hands. That’s what happened in 1994 in Rwanda, when the Hutu majority tribe attacked men, women and children from the minority Tutsi tribe. As we see in the stunning “Hotel Rwanda,” they hacked, stabbed, shot and burned one person at a time. The human effort of that, the will it took, to ignore the supplications of one victim and move on to the next.
When a country descended into madness and the world turned its back, one man had to make a choice. When the world closed its eyes, he has to open his arm. And in this film a man named Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) came forward to show the last breath of humanity towards mankind.
He spends his days arranging favors for people in power and getting supplies to satisfy his prominent guests. He sees all of this as potential collateral to be used in dangerous times for his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) and children. As the tension between the two major groups in Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, Paul sees even more reason to hold on to this security, and soon enough, Hutu militants begin the systematic murder of the Tutsi minority in response to the death of the republic’s president, whose death was supposedly perpetrated by Tutsi rebels. Paul is Hutu; his wife is Tutsi. Upon arriving home when the fighting begins, Paul finds their house overrun with his Tutsi neighbors, who think Paul is the only Hutu they can trust. Soon, Hutu military personnel find the refugees in Paul’s house, and after some intense bargaining, he manages to bring them all to the hotel, where they can stay until United Nations peacekeepers in the area under the command of Col. Oliver (Nick Nolte) can arrange their safe passage.
Director and co-writer Terry George is no stranger to political filmmaking – or political ‘hot potato’ topics – having worked as a screenwriter with Irish director Jim Sheridan on two films that examined the IRA: In The Name Of The Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997). With its ‘unfashionable’ African subject matter George thought he would never get Hotel Rwanda financed or made for that matter, having been told time and time again “that Hollywood has almost no interest in African stories…because they are a financial liability”. Black is not beautiful in Hollywood, it seems.
But when it is made, the film has scored three major nominations at Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Don Cheadle (Boogie Nights, Out Of Sight) who once again manages to find the emotional core of every scene he is in playing Rusesabegina. It is a demanding role but one this immensely talented actor is more than up for. And the rest of the cast are also uniformly excellent, including Sophie Okenedo (Dirty Pretty Things), Nick Nolte (Cape Fear) and Joaquin Phoenix (To Die For).
His epiphany after being told by Nick Nolte’s U.N. peacekeeper that the West views him and his people as “dirt, worthless,” and therefore won’t intercede in the slaughter, is crushing. The film contains many such zingers: snippets from a radio broadcast in which a Western political spokeswoman says that while there have been “acts of genocide,” they don’t meet the criteria for being declared genocide; the Tutsi man who gives the back story on the ethnic tensions and how they were created (“The Belgians used the Tutsi to run the country. Then when they left, they left the power to the Hutu. And, of course, the Hutu took their revenge on the Tutsi for years of repression”); Joaquin Phoenix’s well-intentioned photojournalist, listening to that same fellow explain how the Belgians managed their divide-and-conquer colonialist strategy: “According to Belgian colonists, the Tutsi were taller, more elegant. It was the Belgians who created the division. They [arbitrarily] picked those with thinner noses, lighter skin. They used to measure the width of people’s noses.” Phoenix shakes his head and remarks that two women friends sitting next to him at the hotel bar — one Hutu, the other Tutsi — could be twins, they look so much alike. Except they don’t, and the film brilliantly lets his statement hang there.
It’s no surprise that the movie, based on the real story of Rusesabagina, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and a similar prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It sweeps over you with blunt, unequivocal conviction.