Film Review: Hotel Rwanda

Just Like That: A Review of Hotel Rwanda (Edinburgh Times 2005)

Hotel Rwanda, is a powerful 2004 historical drama film about the hotelier Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. The film, which has been called an African Schindler's List, documents Rusesabagina's acts to save the lives of his family and more than a thousand other refugees, by granting them shelter in the besieged Hôtel des Mille Collines. Directed by Terry George, the film was co-produced by US, British, Italian, and South African companies, with filming done on location in Johannesburg, South Africa and Kigali, Rwanda.

What most critics have thus far failed to notice, however, is that the film is also a subtle but devastating critique of first world actions and inactions with regards to the use of DDT in Africa between the 1970s and early 21st century. The UN forces, for example, who stand by as the genocide takes place around them are directly comparable to aid agencies and others who pumped millions of dollars in to fighting malaria. This was so evidently the director's real meaning that I am surprised that other critics have thus far missed the entire point of the film, instead bringing their blinkered, literalist (and above all statist) preconceptions to the film.

The blizzard of machete strikes during one harrowing scene obviously represents the blizzard of bad science promulgated by environmental nutjobs, with each fresh corpse a cipher for an African baby struck down needlessly by malaria (if you don't believe me, watch the scene again, as the camera pulls slowly back from the scene, one can see a mosquito flying left out of shot. What could be clearer?)

I'd give the film eight out of ten. Many people will take a surface reading of the film, as being plainly and simply about the Rwandan genocide, but those people will not...