PLOT: During the mid-'90s massacre of Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina saved more than 1,000 people by taking them in at the hotel he managed in Kigali.
During the Toronto film festival last fall, two films about the genocide in Rwanda had major impact.
One of them is the documentary, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, which will air on CBC TV's Passionate Eye on Jan. 31.
The other film is Hotel Rwanda, filmmaker Terry George's fictionalized account of one man's heroic actions during the bloodshed. Taken together, these films can tell you far more about human nature than you ever really wanted to know.
Hotel Rwanda is a great story well told. Don Cheadle stars in the film as Paul Rusesabagina, a real-life hotelier who worked in Kigali during the Rwandan conflict. Rusesabagina managed the Hotel Mille Collines, and when extremist Hutu began to slaughter the Tutsi populace, Rusesabagina risked his own life, his family and everything he had to shelter a thousand people.
The storytelling is what makes Hotel Rwanda work, although Cheadle's stellar performance doesn't hurt. Filmmaker Terry George uses one man's story to tell the wider tale of the genocide, introducing enough historical detail about the conflict to draw viewers in without overwhelming them.
Much is seen from the perspective of Cheadle's character, a fairly ambitious hotelier hoping not to get involved in any of the troubles.
Rusesabagina doesn't intervene when a Tutsi neighbour is arrested because, as he tells his wife (Sophie Okonedo), that person is not family.
When a Red Cross worker turns up at the hotel with several Tutsi orphans who need refuge, Rusesabagina worries that he will lose his job over any humanitarian action. But try as he might to maintain the status quo, Rusesabagina sees that he cannot continue to do nothing.
Cheadle plays Rusesabagina not as a selfless hero but as an ordinary man responding as best he can to extraordinary circumstances. His understated performance is the heart and soul of Hotel Rwanda.
Various other characters -- Nick Nolte plays a UN soldier sort of based on Canada's Romeo Dallaire, Joaquin Phoenix is a reporter -- are on hand, seemingly, to illustrate how little the rest of the world did when Rwanda imploded.
This is a story too big to even begin to comprehend, much less turn into a movie; still, by keeping the focus small, the filmmakers manage big impact.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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