In the his­tory of mankind, wars and geno­cides have been hap­pen­ing in one or the other part of the world. Some are known like Holo­caust and some unknown like the Geno­cide in Rwanda. It’s between two reli­gions in Rwanda — every­where the issue is same and the names of the groups change. Here, the group names are ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Hutu’.

Why did they fight? The same old major­ity and minor­ity rea­sons. Hutus are major­ity and the Tut­sis are treated as minor­ity peo­ple. It’s one of the geno­cides hap­pened in the recent past [ 1994 ]. Almost, 1 mil­lion Tutsi peo­ple were killed in the 100 days long geno­cide, car­ried out very fast. The geno­cide was ignited by the by the death of the Rwan­dan Pres­i­dent [ he was a Hutu ] in April 1994 ].  It’s just the spark which caused the big­ger fire as the Africa’s largest geno­cide, of our times.

            
What’s your occu­pa­tion ? Busi­ness­man, Engi­neer, Man­ager. Only few can fill up the occu­pa­tion as writer; only a very few can fill up as human­i­tar­ian. In fact it’s the basic attribute of any human being. How­ever very few carry that as prin­ci­ple and one such good human­i­tar­ian is Paul Rus­esabag­ina, who lived in Rwanda and saved 1000s of Tutsi peo­ple in the midst of the genocide.

Plot

In Kigali, Paul Rus­esabgina man­ages a lux­ury hotel and he is a nice busi­ness­man [ Hutu — it’s unavoid­able we get this doubt first ! ]. He has good rap­port with the Hutu lead­ers and man­ages the show peace­fully. His wife Tatiana is a Tutsi and seeks Paul’s help for sav­ing the rest of the Tut­sis in the city [ Paul’s trou­ble also starts from wife  :) ]. The fight between Hutu and Tutsi slowly devel­ops and the intense killings of Tutsi increases, by the pow­er­ful Hutu mil­i­tary and police. Giv­ing the author­ity to Paul, all the Euro­pean staffs run away from the coun­try. Paul becomes the in-charge for the hotel.

Slowly, the hotel becomes a refugee camp for the home­less Tutsi peo­ple. Paul risks his life and tries to cover up 100s of Tutsi peo­ple in a human and non­vi­o­lent way. He is sup­ported by a jour­nal­ist and UN Colonel. No other party is inter­ested to sneak/help in this issue. What hap­pens to the geno­cide, hotel, refugees, Paul and his fam­ily is the story.

View

It’s a docu­d­rama — mean­ing the actual inci­dents are dra­ma­tized. It’s based on true events, where the orig­i­nal Paul saved 1268 Tutsi peo­ple, by pro­tect­ing them from the blood­thirsty Hutu groups. Paul’s role is extra­or­di­nar­ily per­formed by Don Chea­dle [ Oscar nom­i­nated for this role ]. His cast­ing per­fectly matches the role, where he doesn’t look like an action hero in the mid­dle of geno­cide. He deliv­ers the best of his poten­tial, with a grace­ful and con­trolled performance.

There’s a scene where Paul returns in the dark road cov­ered with fog. The small van couldn’t move in the road with lumps and uneven path. The rea­son shocks not only Paul and his dri­ver but the entire view­ers. From the out­look, Paul looks fine and he breaks in a closed room, which cracks the viewer.

The entire movie makes us to believe the ugly vio­lence of one-sided geno­cide, cov­er­ing up the media and all sorts of polit­i­cal rea­sons for the killings. This is not a film mix­ing the geno­cide with glam­our, intend­ing to make huge busi­ness. It tried to explore the hap­pen­ing to the rest of the world in a raw fashion.

Though it is com­pared as “African Schindlers list” and has the same pur­pose [ A busi­ness­man sav­ing lives of refeugees ], this film slightly lacks the skill­ful nar­ra­tion [ may be, bud­get ! ]. Of course, the sub­ject that this film deals, is so del­i­cate and it can’t be depicted poet­i­cally  or with hero­ism [ which may dilute the issue  ]. For me, it’s Don Chea­dle [char­ac­ter­is­tics of Paul Rus­esabgina, in fact ]  makes the movie memorable.

–Toto.

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