Starring: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte
Director: Terry George
The film: Big-screen, mostly factual, scripted treatments of major issues such as genocide set themselves up for scrutiny of their sensitivity. In the much-lauded Hotel Rwanda, it seems that unnecessary sentimentality is successfully kept at bay, which - despite its accolades and fine intentions - could not have been said about Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.
Rwanda's mass genocides are less widely known than those in Nazi Germany or Cambodia - one reason that director Terry George was determined to get this story out with his co-writer Kier Pearson. When the two heard of Paul Rusesabagina's story - the manager of Hotel des Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali saved the lives of more than 1,200 persecuted ethnic Tustis by offering them sanctuary in his UN-protected hotel - they knew the extraordinary true-life script could spotlight one of the bleakest periods in African history.
Rusesabagina's tale is all the more remarkable because he's an ethnic Hutu. Hutus form the racial majority in Rwanda and the national army began its systematic eradication of Tutsis in 1994. Ethnic Hutus found helping Tutsis were, at that time, committing a capital offence.
His wife, Tatiana (played by Sophie Okonedo), is Tutsi, a fact that - through Don Cheadle's portrayal - we see becomes highly relevant when both the Rwandan army and Hutu militia arrive unannounced at various times to inspect the premises and hunt out members of the ethnic minority.
The rampant corruption of officials, who could be bought with bottles of whiskey and crates of beer, is as shocking as the scenes of bloody massacres and the aftermath, some of which was happening just metres from the