The Curates Egg

Can Films "make a difference"?

Prologue

Successfully making a film about real life human tragedy is a difficult business. Being respectful without being dull, truthful without being mawkish or over sensationalising,  making a film that lots of people will want to see without devaluing the tragedy or seeming to profit (at the box office) from others misfortune. When the tragedy is on a huge scale and some of those involved are still alive the task becomes even harder.

Those that have succeeded usually do so by telling one small story of hope within the nightmare that surrounds them. So in the critically successful films about the Holocaust we see Oskar Schindler saving the Jews that work for him ('Schindler's List' – 1993), Wladyslaw Szpilman surviving the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto ('The Pianist' – 2002) or Guido Orefice keeping his son alive in a Nazi death camp ('Life is Beautiful' – 1997).

Similarly 1994's 'The Killing Fields' is set in the Cambodian genocide, which claimed the lives of two million "undesirable" civilians, but tells the story of a local journalist, Dith Pran, who survives despite staying behind to help the New York Times cover events – and being trapped when the Khmer Rouge move in.

All these films are not only of great cinematic value but also of great moral value, and a film which strongly follows in their tradition was released on video/DVD in July – Hotel Rwanda (2004). 

Hotel Rwanda   

The film is set in the spring of 1994, in the central African nation of Rwanda. As the civil war came to a head more than one million Rwandans were killed by Hutu extremists who murdered their Tutsi neighbours and any other countrymen who stood in their way. The genocide was made even more tragic because most of the world ignored the conflict and refused to get involved.

Paul Rusesabagina (played in the film by Don Cheadle) was manager of a luxury hotel in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali. While efforts to enact a peaceful settlement are carried on around him, he keeps the people in power happy so that his Belgian-owned establishment keeps running smoothly.

Rusesabagina is Hutu, but his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) is Tutsi. Arriving home as the fighting erupts, he discovers that his Tutsi neighbours have come seeking protection, since they believe he is the only Hutu they can trust. He bargains with Hutu military personnel in order to bring all of the refugees to the hotel, hoping that United Nations peacekeepers, led by his friend, Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte), can arrange for safe passage.

But the situation continues to deteriorate. Though hundreds of thousands were being murdered, mostly by machete, the U.N. reduced its peacekeeping force from 2,500 to 270 soldiers. Only hotel guests visiting from other parts of the world are allowed to escape the country, and Rusesabagina is forced to use his cunning and limited resources to turn his hotel into a "four-star" refugee camp. He also uses the communication channels available to him, including a visiting photojournalist (Joaquin Phoenix), to let the world know that his country is in turmoil.

Cheadle is a fine actor and he deftly plays a man whose courage and compassion directly saves the lives of his family and over 1,200 others. He shows Rusesabagina as a man who somehow maintains his professionalism and composure while his world is collapsing around him. The film is at times very emotional but the director (Terry George) shows restraint in his dramatization of the violence and the film manages a 12 certificate.

Because of its subject matter this is an important film that we all ought to see, but it does manage to strike that difficult balance which I began with and succeeds artistically as well - this is a true story well told, and one that is well worth seeking out.

Epilogue

But can a film (or any art form) like this make a difference? Occasionally they can make an instant one -  When the American TV mini series  'Holocaust' was aired on German television, police station switchboards were flooded with confessional calls during the scene where people were smashing the windows of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. People who had participated in the actual event were calling to confess their involvement. Also the term 'Holocaust' didn't exist in the German language until the '80s when the great success of the series made it common knowledge. Another example is Krzysztof Kieslowski's  'A Short Film About Killing' (1998) which is so powerful that it was instrumental in the abolition of the death penalty in Poland.

Such effects are rare, but hopefully other films do achieve something, even if in a different way. At the very least they help to keep the knowledge of such things alive and so reduce the chances of them happening again. The fact that something as tragic as the Rwandan genocide could have occurred within the past 12 years indicates that our world still has a lot to learn, even from its recent history, and films like 'Hotel Rwanda' can at least remind us of this.   

Tim