The Scariest Movies Are True Movies

Last night I saw the 10:00 showing of Hotel Rwanda; it was the only time I had to get to the Astro this week, but not the best thing to watch right before going to bed. Before I go into what I thought about the movie, I'm curious as to how they produced it - from where did they get such a huge cast? Was part of the movie real war footage? It looks like it was a huge endeavor on both the part of the directors and the cast. If they actually filmed the movie in Rwanda, were they ever endangered?

As to the content of the movie itself, I left feeling a mixture of gratefulness and guilt for being born an American. That's in a nutshell, because I obviously can't help being born with all the freedoms I enjoy here - and I am grateful for them - I just know it's easy to do what the videographer said we do, which is be horrified for a minute or two, then turn away from the television and go back to eating our dinners. When all this was going on I was going into the fifth grade, and I remember that a friend and I went door to door that summer in her neighborhood asking people for donations to help the children in Rwanda. It was for a fundraiser in our Vacation Bible School, and for all I knew at the time, they were starving; I didn't learn until much later that they were being "chopped" with machetes in order to prevent another generation of them from rising up. I can't imagine the terror I would feel as a child whose parents could no longer protect me, or, worse, as a mother who has to watch her children suffer and live in fear.

Moving past the emotional impact of the movie (which was at full throttle - I almost got sick during the fog scene), it gives us a good example of what the UN is and is not able to do. Because they do not believe in violence, it is very difficult for them to stop violence when it reaches the intensity it did in Rwanda. Fortunately for the UN workers in this movie, most of the murders were not through guns and so even holding one gave them some kind of an edge. But a million people were still killed - if the UN could have shot people, would fewer people have died? Or, rather, if the UN could have depended on the soldiers of other nations, such as Belgium (who is reaping the consequences of their colonizing efforts) to send soldiers and help keep the peace by posing an actual threat to those out for genocide, maybe working in conjunction with each other, the war could have ended more quickly and with fewer deaths. What was the reasoning behind Belgium not sending in their troops to help the Rwandans? And what about other countries - what was our reasoning, exactly?

Like Professor Fishman, I'm glad I watched the movie - but it was very hard to watch. Though I knew a good deal about the Rwandan situation then, you can forget facts and numbers. I can't forget what I saw last night.