Hotel Rwanda is a disturbing film to watch, much like the yesterday's news that it reports. I remember when my father was watching the new reports of Kosovo and the Racak Massacre in 1999, and how the horrifying events and the actions of these "evil men", as he called them sent him further into depression, just by watching the news. I think that watching Hotel Rwanda has had a similar effect on me. It is a film that has put me at the forefront of the horrors of genocide and the extent of evil that people are capable of.

For those unfamiliar with the film, it tells the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (played here by Don Cheadle), a Rwandan Hotel owner who becomes a humanitarian hero in the midst of Rwanda's civil war in 1994. As the political turmoil of guerrilla warfare and an assassination of the president ignites the old racial divides between the Hutus and the Tutsis of Rwanda, the Hutu-ran state armies and interwhami militia begin an ethnic cleansing of all their Tutsi neighbours. Paul (who is a Hutu, but shares marriage to Tatiana, a Tutsi woman with whom he has three children) comes to shelter his family and over a thousand other Tutsi refugees in his hotel as the country is besieged by the genocide and escape for the marked Tutsis becomes impossible.

It goes without saying that this film is a success in every department. It is small wonder that the film was nominated for three academy awards for best screenplay, best actor and actress. Most of the events and persons depicted on screen are true, but there are selected frills and additions and individual characters that actually represent composites of various peoples, all with the achieved effect of making the events that surround Paul's day to day experiences into more of a microcosm of what was happening all over the country, and of compacting major events into single scenes. The directing is of high calibre, and maintains the modern cinema tradition of conveying images and events with sharp detail and vividness. Both of which are done without costing the film any sense of true realism.

The film is one of high tension and I could never say there was a dull moment, though for the sake of avoiding crassness, the film tends towards the more uncomfortable and stressful side of tension than the exciting side- though there is certainly an inspiring battle of wills at work too. The look of the film tends towards the bright and the colourful with a bright sandy and summery look and with militia men bearing sharp colours on their scarf's and bandanas. It gives the film an expressively cultural feel, but also a feeling of vibrancy and inflamed passion that suggests how spontaneously the situation in Rwanda will turn into a bloodbath and how irrepressible the people will become. There are also particular scenes shown in a menacing degree of dungeon darkness. There is also a choice amount of scenes where Don Cheadle is shirtless, which works not so much as eye-candy for the ladies, but at building a sense of undignified nakedness before the enemy and a physical sense of the body and the vivid metabolic sensation of fear, as well as making the presentation feel really physically hands on and grappling.

The music is a strange beast, there are two musical scores that register the most for me. One begins as a typical Hollywoodised heart stringing violin piece- the kind that is easy to dismiss as schmaltsy and intrusive, but then overlapping it, almost dischordantly so is the sound of Rwandan children singing, which gives it a real edge and makes the song into the voice of the Rwandans' despair. The other piece of incidental music which stands out for me is one that plays at three points in the film- firstly in the scene where Joaquin Phoenix, the reporter shows video footage taken from a distance of Tutsis being beaten to death on the roadside, another where Paul stumbles in the mist by nightfall onto a bodymound, and finally in the moment where the memory of the latter comes back to Paul and he breaks down. It is a strange form of music, very quiet, not really ma melody, just a rather haunting and malicious horn note that taunts the viewer and refuses to go silent and is almost ghostly and which really adds to the unshakeable horror of the scene.

The acting is all round superb, and Don Cheadle certainly gives the finest performance. I had seen Don Cheadle before in the film "Crash", but his role in that film didn't seem to show off his range as an actor in quite the way that this film does. This is a film that places Paul's character into panic situations, calling on Cheadle's strengths of subtle facial acting as well as his more manic acting and he pulls both off admirably.

There is a scene where Paul has been outside the hotel and come across a body mound of countless murdered Tutsis and he returns to the hotel clearly disturbed but trying to maintain professional dignity. When he retreats to his changing room the horrors of what he has seen catch up with him and he can't hold it in anymore and he breaks down in tears. His breakdown is a panic, a loss of control and that of a man who feels something sickening has worked its way into him and he is desperate to get it out. In the actor's commentary on the DVD, Don Cheadle says he wasn't entirely happy with how he performed the moment, as though it was a little less than perfect, but I personally can't fathom why because in that scene I lived in the moment and I didn't see any acting, I saw Don Cheadle literally become Paul Rusesabagina.

All these things combined and you certainly believe what you see. It may not have the traditional 'realist' look to it, but somehow that doesn't matter. The film doesn't flinch from a real and disillusioning situation.

It is the characterisation that makes this story one worth its telling. We see characters like Jack (Joaquin Phoenix) the young but world weary cynic reporter, who represent the defeatist view that the world is always going to be rotten because not enough people care enough to change it. On a similar wavelength is Conoel Oliver (Nick Nolte) who heads the UN peacekeepers, and comes to represent disillusionment and self loathing when he realises that the UN doesn't care about stopping the genocide, and that he himself is bound by orders not to open fire on any militia or soldiers.

On the other side of the fence there is the radio announcer of RTLM who incites the genocide and represents hatred of a kind that is educated and self-righteous but ultimately unquenchiable (I must give credit to the voice performer who really made his presence and believable character felt)- this is a film that really lifts the lid on how much people can hate. There is also George Rutaganda (Hakeem Kai-Kazim), the rich president of the interhamwe militia who simply represents sadism and malice and how a priviledged rich upbringing can still breed evil men.

There are also various Hutus, including Hotel staff who use the blackmail threat of betraying the refugees to the militia to get whatever they want, and they represent the moral vacuum of this madness and lawlessness, as well as the priviledge of having power over others through denying themselves a conscience. There is also General Bizimungu (Fana Mokoena) who is one of the few Generals in the army to help Paul and his refugees, however he lets it be known that he has as much contempt for the Tutsis as anyone and that he won't give something for nothing. It is in initially difficult to discern one character from another, since some of the characters have only very brief screen time. But this doesn't matter- on repeated viewings their roles become clearer and end up being most important to the film thematically.

At the centre of this however is Paul Rusesebagina. Your typical new-age sensitive man, with all the boundless compassion and tragic naivety that goes with it. A middle class man with love and family at the centre of his life. He is motivated by the instinctive desire to save as many lives as he can for as long as he can, trying to do everything in a panic- he doesn't carry guns and uses his business connections and negotiation and bribary savvy to see the situation through.

Usually in a film about global atrocities, the viewpoint is relegated to the American or British journalist to mirror that audience sense of culture shock. But by making the view-point of Rwanda that of the native, the film feels much more personal in its portrayal of a country's descent into madness, making us share in Paul's disillusionment, still unable to believe that his fellow neighbours could be capable of such slaughter. In-fact if any of the other characters were the centre of the story, it could have been a very cynical film of unvented frustration, defeatism or moral ambiguity. But it is placing Paul at the centre of the film that makes it essentially a morality play about the best qualities of man still prevailing in the worst of nations, about nobility and humanitarianism winning out at the cost of a proud man's dignity.

The surrendering of dignity that comes with having to pay a soldier everything he has to bribe him into not shooting his family and friends- even vocalising the bribe must have been humiliating and an admission of helplessness. He eventually comes to represent hope however, but not a naive hope amidst disillusioning events but a hope that is weathered in every which way that hope can be weathered and yet still emerges victorious.

Well I say victory, but really the victory in this film is staying alive. That's as good as it gets, and it's something that is now very common in modern cinema, but in a way it is a triumph for the human spirit because unlike in most films about survival, not only is Paul trying to save his own neck, but tries to save as many others as he can.

This film goes through the motions brilliantly. It begins on a very hopeful note at the point where the President of Rwanda is finally able to negotiate a peace treaty with the Tutsi rebels, and the eponymous Hotel becomes the centre of celebrations at which various characters who will be on enemy lines with each other, later in the film, are for once gathered in unison.

There is an omen of horrors to come when we listen to the Hutu Power Radio station and its brand of hate mongering rhetoric (In terms of the film's culture shock, the radio station itself is almost like an absurd surrealism, of a deranged and psychotic voice dominating the public radio waves), but at this stage it is easy to take Paul at his wisdom when he dismisses the voice on the radio "They are fools, their time is soon over", and when we get to the Hotel and see both a Hutu and a Tutsi woman at the bar together gossiping like sisters we really believe that the old prejudices have been erased for good. Indeed the voice of the radio announcer sounds so gravely and tired that he sounds as old and as played out as his ancient bigotry.

But inevitably comes the fall from grace as the president is assassinated and fingers get pointed at the Tutsi rebels. That night houses are being burned and soldiers are abducting people from their homes and Paul has to shelter many of his Tutsi neighbours at home. The next morning the radio announcement comes with renewed fury and outrage and manages to rub and manipulate the Hutu people's mourning and desire for vengeance over their dead president and coaxes them to join in the slaughter of all the Tutsis. And from there it is an onslaught of killing, terror and madness, a country going mad en masse.

Again hope shines its light in the intervention of the UN who set up a protection racket and help move refugees to Paul's Hotel where they can stand their ground until reinforcements come and the refugees can be safely transported out of the country. But again hope is betrayed when it is revealed that the UN have orders to withdraw and leave the Rwandans to their own hell. This bit of the film is handled wonderfully Nick Nolte's throwing his UN cap to the ground in protest at the withdrawal orders from his senior, and his later confessional moment to Paul- "You should spit in my face!". Hotel Rwanda may be a slightly less radical breed of film about a besieged country in recent times than those in the 80's like The Killing Fields or Oliver Stone's Salvador in which the film's outrage at America and the United Nations was directed at our actions and intervention in those war torn countries rather than our lack of intervention. The moment where Joaquin Phoenix, the journalist remarks about the footage he's captured of the killings, and the reaction it will get from the rest of the world has been rightly quoted as the film's most potent line "When people see this footage, they'll say 'Oh my God, that's horrible!' and then go on eating their dinners". The funny thing it's a judgement about our society that's so obviously true, and has been so for so long that it shouldn't really need to be said at all, but tragically it remains something that has always needed to be said.

But for me that sense of outrage at our society is one bettered in a later scene where Paul and the refugees are listening to a debate within the UN committee in debating the genocide in Rwanda, and the refugees listen in dismay as the debate turns into an inane discussion about whether the opening speaker was right to use the term 'genocide' to describe what was going on- clearly the UN committee are merely trying to bully the issue into silence. That to me represents the bravest moment of the film in attacking our society- it's a slap in the face of our modern conceit about being able to debate and analyse social and global problems so intellectually, that we somehow think of our words on these issues as a good enough substitute for actually doing anything about them, and how our fondness for euphemisms is like hoping that if we can make these issues sound softer then the problems themselves won't be so bad.

Of course the bulk of the blame is laid at the superpowers themselves, not necessarily the populace of America or Europe. In the scene where the various Red Cross and Christian Aid groups converge on the Hotel to collectively escape the country, carrying with them Tutsi refugees and orphans, they expect the UN personnel to accommodate the refugees onto transport, but the Rwandans are refused and there is a heartbreaking scene of the American and European men and women clinging on to dear life to the children they have sheltered, but being dragged apart by the soldiers. I think we prefer to see ourselves in the white aid workers rather than the calloused soldiers and passport checkers.

In terms of conveying the full horror of the genocide whilst keeping the focus on Paul, the film does use the art of restraint in a very effective way- we don't actually see most of the killings. It uses subtlety to convey the horrors and relies on the old maxim of how a shout is easier to deal with than a whisper. Most of the action of the film centres around the Hotel and the refugees, using the setting as a base under siege rather. It very rarely turns its lense onto the streets where the killings are taking place, and when it does it implies rather than shows- we tend to see the hatred and fury of militia characterised by acts of vandalism against hoses and the windshields of refugee convoys- and it is volatile. When we travel with Paul in his van to the Hotel, we see the masses of Hutu militia in carnival celebration on the streets and on top of houses, and we see Tutsis sitting on the grass, bowing and covering their ears, clearly in a distraught surrender to the truth that the country has gone mad en masse, then we continue with Paul to the sanctuary.

There is a scene where Paul visits George, the president of the militia (who is also a business associate of Paul) and he views Tutsi prisoners in a cage and sees them being taunted by militia who scream threats at them and rattle their cage. There is a great look of resignation in Paul's eyes that is clearly sorry that he can't do anything for them, and that they will probably not live long after he goes. The actual shots of the prisoners in the cage are brief as we stay with Paul and his predicament for looking after his own, and it is only in repeated viewings that I came to notice that all the prisoners were women, at which point it became distressingly clear why they were being kept alive.

There are a few moments in the beginning where Terry George succumbs to the temptation to use reaction shots from Paul and Tatiana as they squeamishly witness the brutality of soldiers and militia, which unfortunately in the early scenes has the effect on me as a viewer of feeling like I'm being told how to feel by the events, though in retrospect those early scenes of squeamishness from the characters actually work at showing how far they have come by the end of the film. The scene where the video footage of Tutsis being beaten is shown, is one that is shot from a distance so that the moment doesn't play up to any intensity. The most violent moment of the film is when a truck of the refugees is ambushed and the militia are seen up close beating Tutsis and bringing down knives and throats cut and geysers of blood, and this is shown in fast cuts and it shocks but isn't dwelled on for more than a second.

For many the most horrific moment of the film is the aforementioned scene where Paul stumbles on the bodymound in the mist, but to me the most horrifying and harrowing moment of the film isn't any one image but a line of dialogue spoken by a Red Cross worker who witnessed the militia go into an orphanage and kill Tutsi children. "They made me watch. There was one girl, she had her little sister wrapped around her back. As they were about to chop her she cried out to me 'please don't let them kill me, I promise I won't be Tutsi anymore'." It always makes me well up when I think back to that scene and the power of it is that it catches us unawares with dialogue instead of images, and doesn't give us a chance to shy away from the vivid picture those words convey.

It has been suggested that the film falls short of communicating the reasons why the Hutus hate the Tutsies or indeed why people harbour racial hatreds. On the one hand I have come to believe that some people are just born evil, some people may have had all the chances in the world but would immediately want to kill someone from the first moment they met them. To me I found the film to communicate the reasons for the genocide enough. The film presents us early on with an easily digested history of Rwanda and what differentiates Hutus and Tutsis (including the ancient grudge against the Tutsis) through both the curiosity of foreign journalists and the hate-mongering propaganda of the Hutu Power radio stations.

Clearly Rwanda was a country where things were not going well, economically or politically (indeed many credit the unprofitable nature of Rwanda as a reason why the superpowers didn't consider it a country worth protecting). As a Third World Country, inevitably those who are not well off harbour bitterness, and also something else- a rose tinted nostalgia for better times, and a desire to hang on a simplifying point of where it all went wrong.

"When people ask me good listeners why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say 'read our history'. The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists, they stole our Hutu land."

Within that is a desire to somehow pin an historical issue that supposedly influenced the current state of affairs, and that's where the Tutsies become scapegoats for their past sins against the Hutus, and where a disenfranchised nation is moved to exterminate a half of its population out of a belief that it will put things right again -by retroactively erasing the Tutsis from Rwanda's jaded history- out of a belief that they are doing something to improve things. In many ways the film says a lot about helplessness on all levels. Of course if there is one fact that is constantly conveyed by this film is that picking on the underdog is the easiest thing in the world to do.

For a people who are angry at the chaos of the country and the political mess of Rwanda, reclaiming a sense of Hutu racial pride has become a twisted reason to bear their stripes, scarfs and bandannas in the streets and wield machettis and intimidate Tutsis by scraping them against the roadways as a sign of wielding threat and power, and in verbally denigrating and dehumanising Tutsis to the level of animals to feel superior. There are countless points in the film where Hutus describe Tutsis as 'cockroaches', and each time it is said with disturbing relish.

The viewpoint of the film is from the victims, so it doesn't go out of its way to portray the Hutu militia as sympathetic or as having any humanity that was not characterised by the most base, ugly and evil elements of human psychology. These are men who have turned their backs on their conscience- who despise mercy. But at the same time they are presented as people who believe absolutely that what they are doing is right and is somehow benefiting their society and the 'greater good'. Some lap up the sadism, and others demand that their victim should give their name before dying, perhaps to know if they were one of the listed 'traitors'. But we certainly don't see the Militia or soldiers as people we should empathise with. There is a scene late in the film where for once we see the Hutu Interhamwe militia facing violent resistance and being shot down by Tutsi Rebels, and I must say I was cheering when I saw those militia men being killed. Even though I knew this was a real event and that the Hutu militia were real people who died real deaths, I cheered at their deaths- how much compassion could I have for those men who murdered children?

The sight of Hutu militia crowding the streets with machetes is more terrifying than any knife wielding slashers in a horror film. Yet we may see the Interhamwe militia boldly terrorising the Tutsis at many points, but whenever the military or UN intervene and start pointing guns their way, the same militia men then retreat almost every time, shying away from the barrel of a gun- proved to be the cowards that they really are, who can only achieve a position of power when their victim is powerless (it is reassuring actually that in the Director's commentary- which generally is devoted to factual information about the Rwanda situation and which scenes of the film were the most accurate, rather than technical 'making of' information, the real Paul Rusesebagina is able to simply dismiss the racism of the Interhamwe as 'arrogance'- he also participates on the informative documentary 'A Message for Peace' that is really the only other extra on the disc) and it hits me that these aren't men who are looking to become martyrs.

Paul himself does get braver as the film goes on. Initially he sought refuge at his hotel, wanting to stay alive as much as anyone. But as the film goes on he ends up passing up the chance to leave early with a small band of refugees and decides to risk his life protecting the ones left behind- after all he made the mistake of looking back. And the moment where he shows balls of steel is when his requests for help are refused by General Bizimungu. Paul is now out of money and out of allies, and what we see is a weak and humiliated man spontaneously growing a backbone and spitting in his enemy's face whilst at gunpoint out of the knowledge that he no longer has anything left to lose, and that the fear of dying has become so physically unbearable that ironically he actually thinks of death now as being a euphoric relief.

Basically he blackmails General Bizimungu by holding him to the fact that somewhere someone has looked at Bizimungu's rank and decided to make a war criminal out of him, and that one day he will be caught. Although Paul doesn't actually mention the Nazis, it is pretty clear he is trying to put the fear of Nuremberg into Bizimungu. When all his power is taken away, Paul actually wins the battle of wills by drawing on a higher moral power that lives through history and crushes the tyrants in the end. The scene seems to cry out for harsher punishments against war criminals.

So whilst the film is about how survival is as good as it gets, it does hint that maybe things will change for the better when the stories are told and people are made to care in a way that they couldn't before and might start to actually make a difference- to make provisions against these genocides ever happening again.

The film is not all doom and gloom- apart from the aforementioned scenes where Paul finally shows new-found courage that elevates his predicament from being merely a parade of pain, the scenes between Paul and his wife Tatiana also provide similar leverage from the terror, moments of relief in tenderness, moments of inspiring introspection and even the occasional moment of comic relief, which at the backdrop of the panic surrounding them often literally is characterised by the hysterical laughter of relief in the aftermath, and as such it is a laughter that we can't help but share in.

There is also a scene immediately after Paul breaks down from the horrors of the bodymound where the sunlight has broken to a beautiful sky and Paul is silently overcoming the horrors of what he has seen in the outdoor play area of the Hotel, while he watches the children perform a delicate African dance that is beautiful and sensual and allows for a sense of serenity that is the calm eye of the storm. It allows us to feel that at this moment in time they are all sheltered and safe together and free to express themselves through movement and enjoy their youth. Even though seeing these children can't help but bring to mind the heartbreaking description of the massacre at the orphanage, the scene itself is about the things that survive despite it all, and calls into context the fact that ultimately Paul does save over a thousand people, and that in itself is a beautiful thing, and as the old maxim goes, where there's life there's hope.

I don't think there is much else I can say about the film and I think I've used up more than enough hyperbole already. It is actually a very radical film in many ways and it certainly will get under your skin in a big way- perhaps not in a pleasant way, but this isn't a film that is to be enjoyed, though there are precious moments of joy in the film in spite of it all. The film closes with Wycleff Jean's song "Million Voices" written specially for the film and the events it depicts, and from where I'm standing, it could possibly be the best song he's ever done, with a wonderful economy of lyrics that so neatly sum up the poignancy of what happened. This is very much a film about taking action, about moral courage and working to compensate for the inaction of the United Nations, about bearing responsibility and about one man making a difference.

Ordinarily I would rate this film as being unsuitable for those under 18 due to its scenes of intensity and distressing moments (though moments of actual violence are brief and language is mild), but there again I think the topical value of this film outweighs the adult content and that this is a film that really should be seen by a wide range of audiences- that needs to be seen, and therefore I recommend it for audiences aged twelve and above.