Film Report Cultura Americana 45720 Sergio Luis Bravo Flores.

Hotel Rwanda (2004).

The story is set in the 1994 civil massacre in Rwanda and the experiences that a
group of people went through during the Rwandan genocide. Between the months
of May and July 1994, almost a million people were killed in Rwanda.
The Rwandan genocide was an attempt to exterminate the Tutsi population by the
Hutu government of Rwanda in which approximately 70% of the Tutsis were killed,
it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were
killed. Sexual violence was widespread; the mass killings began after the April 6,
1994 attack on Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President
Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, who died after the plane in which they were
traveling was shot down by two missiles launched from the ground.
Hotel Rwanda tells the story of Paul, a Hutu hotelier who took in 1,500 threatened
Tutsis. Faced with the pressure received by his Tutsi wife and his children. He
decides to take refuge with them in the hotel where he works as a manager; today
the four-star hotel is still open, has one hundred and twelve rooms, a bar and
cafeteria, three conference rooms, a restaurant and a swimming pool. Paul was
waiting for better news, the truth is that the tragedy was beginning and Paul only
has the courage of him to face the most delicate of the matter and refugees that
begins to knock on his doors.
In the film after the assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, the
indiscriminate killings of Tutsis at the hands of Hutu soldiers and citizens begin.
Paul manages to protect his loved ones in the hotel, where hundreds of people
begin to arrive asking for help. Meanwhile, a young cameraman and a BBC
reporter attend the show and Paul uses all possible resources and bribes to keep
the Tutsi refugees at the hotel alive. Soon, international forces arrive in Rwanda
but only to evacuate citizens of European nationalities and return them to their
countries of origin and with non-intervention orders.
Tensions between Hutus and Tutsis escalated to one of the bloodiest episodes in
recent history. The horror of these events is revealed in all its magnitude when one
considers that they hardly found an echo in the international media, and that the
Rwandan people were engulfed in horror as they demanded the action of an
international force that would never arrive.
Hotel Rwanda is a thrilling movie. Hopefully it will also serve to inform Western
public opinion of the true dimension of a barbarism that should never have
occurred. The role of Western countries, the United Nations and the Catholic
Church in the genocide has been questioned for having imposed or tolerated a
Film Report Cultura Americana 45720 Sergio Luis Bravo Flores.

colonial system, promoted the division of the population into castes, and for having
maintained a passive or complicit posture during the massacres.