Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda is an amazing movie I think is very important to watch as a young adult. What is amazing about this film is that you can feel the victim's pain and sorrows. The main character Paul (Don Cheadle) the manager of a luxury hotel also a Hutu, decides to risk his life for his Tutsi family and 1,200 other Tutsi people by protecting them in his hotel now nicknamed Hotel Rwanda. The movie is based on actual events in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali during the 1994 civil genocide.

In a time where communication was in full force with daily and nightly news shown nearly 5 times in 24 hours, the Rwanda issue in Africa was practically un-noticed. In only three short months, over a million Tutsi Africans died because of their cultural affiliation. Before the civil war between the two groups, the United Nations were the primary overseers of Rwanda. They put the Hutu's in control in hopes to prepare the state to become independent. The Hutu's then had absolute power and wanted to rid the state of the Tutsi people. As the war progressed, the western powers including the United States refused to get involved. Bill Clinton, who was president of the U.S at the time, was told not to intervene due to what happened in Somalia years before. Because of a fear of political unrest, the western powers did nothing to help out the suffering people of Rwanda.

As embarrassing as it sounds, before this movie, I had never heard the real story of the genocide that had taken place in Africa only a short time ago. Movies like this that show these types of things are so important because without them, we might never learn. As you watch dramas like these you want to learn more. Lucky for us, there is the internet where if you look, you can find additional information about anything. There are even websites now that take donations based on the current need of the country. The