2-25-05, 8:45 am

Hotel Rwanda Directed by Terry George From Morning Star Some facts first.


In 1994, after the assassination in a plane crash of the country's leader major general Juvenal Habyarimana, the long-simmering hostility of the Hutus for their fellow Rwandans the Tutsi boiled over into a bloody genocide.

For the next three months, the Western powers ignored the horrors as another 'Third World incident.'

Killings spread throughout the country, the Western nations withdrew and the UN rendered itself impotent by reducing its 'peacekeeping' force from 2,500 to 250 soldiers and, in the course of 100 days, almost a million people were slaughtered.

Keir Pearson's co-writer Terry George's lashing indictment focuses its justifiable anger on the character of real-life hero Paul Rusesabagina, who is powerfully played by deservedly Oscar-nominated Don Cheadle.

He is the manager of a four-star hotel in Kigali who saved the lives of over 1,000 refugees from certain death by sheltering them in the hotel by using native cunning and calculated venality —bribery was a constant fact of life in Africa - to keep them alive.

Hotel Rwanda, shot in South Africa - which explains the unlikely English-language signs in the establishing shots of what's meant to be Kigali - is a commanding, often gruelling but absolutely essential movie.

It has a hero who emerges as an African version of Oscar Schindler and hits you with the same forcefully horrific impact of Spielberg's genocide drama but without that film's inevitable Hollywood bloat.

George doesn't spare the viewer. Among many unforgettable sequences, Rusesabagina's discovery that the 'bumps' in the road he has been experiencing are actually corpses that he has been driving over in the mist is nightmarishly vivid.

But he doesn't indulge in gratuitous unpleasantness either. While the violence and terror that his images create are all too horrifyingly believable, he succeeds splendidly in making key characters.

As well as Rusesabagina, there is his Tutsi wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) and Nick Nolte's impotent UN commander, who tells Rusesabagina: 'All the whites are leaving - we are being abandoned.'

Cynically, one could argue that, had bomber Bush and photo-opportunity Blair been in power in 1994, they might have staged an Iraq-style invasion of Rwanda.

Or, in reality, probably not, since no oil supplies were involved and, this time, instead of remaining on the sidelines and adopting a highly unconvincing high moral tone, the French had already taken the doubtless highly profitable responsibility of supplying arms to the murderous Hutu.

George maintains a fine balance between potent polemic and personal drama, staging compelling drama with impressive straightforwardness while allowing his actors space and material with which to emerge as flesh and blood people and not mere political ciphers.

Okonedo has rightly earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and Nolte is better than he has been in years. Hotel Rwanda is both timely and timeless in the brutal points that it makes and has been rewarded with an Oscar nomination as best motion picture.

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