A review from The Movie Snob.

Hotel Rwanda (A). I am not in the habit of describing movies as "must-see" events, but I'll make an exception for this remarkable movie. It is a story about the genocide that took place in the small African country of Rwanda in 1994. As I understand it, the country consisted of two major tribal or ethnic groups, the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi. Suddenly, and apparently with very little warning, huge numbers of Hutu began massacring their Tutsi neighbors, generally with machetes. The Western countries were agonizingly slow to respond, and within a very short period of time something like one million Tutsis were butchered. This movie covers the span from just before the genocide until its end, which apparently occurred only because a Tutsi rebel faction finally managed to launch a successful counteroffensive and force the Hutu to terms. I saw an article about Rwanda not too terribly long ago, and it reported that there were still numerous Hutu in prison for war crimes that still had not been reached for trial ten years later.

This movie views the genocide from the perspective of one man, a very civilized and urbane Hutu named Paul (Don Cheadle), who manages what is apparently the fanciest four-star hotel in the capital city. We watch through his eyes as the situation rapidly deteriorates--the Westerners are evacuated, refugees fill the hotel in their place, and the handful of UN peacekeepers on hand are utterly impotent to help as the corpses literally pile up in the streets. Mercifully, the director manages to convey the violence and terror with a minimum of graphic close-ups, but the depiction is still extraordinarily effective. Cheadle's performance is Best Actor caliber, utterly convincing as an ordinary man suddenly called on to save over 1,000 people with nothing but his wits and the connections to the rich and powerful that he has cultivated over the years.

You must see this film.

(For further reading, I recommend The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa, by Bill Berkeley (2001).)