Filmmaker Aims to ‘Shame’ Viewers With Drama on Rwandan Genocide

Nearly 10 years after the Rwandan genocide, a Hollywood studio is planning a film, touted as a love story and political thriller about the massacres.

The aim, says director Terry George, is to reproach the world for its failure to stop the 1994 Hutu genocide of 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, in 100 days. Moderate Hutus who refused to take part were also slaughtered.

“I’m particularly determined to shame everybody in the audience if I possibly can,” George said Friday. “It’s just beyond shame how this was left to escalate into the fastest genocide of the 20th century.”

The film, “Hotel Rwanda,” is based on the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the heroic manager of the five-star Mille Collines hotel in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. He saved more than 1,000 Tutsis who took refuge in his hotel as Hutu militias rampaged around the country hacking Tutsis to death while the government broadcast calls for ordinary Hutus to do the same.

African politics and racial genocide may not be typical Hollywood fodder, but George said he could not get up in the morning unless he was making films that he found meaningful. “Initially, we were walking into Hollywood studios saying we want to do a movie about the genocide in Rwanda, which kind of topped my last film about the Irish hunger strikes,” George said during a news conference here. “You get the look of, ‘Uh-oh, this lunatic’s back with these ridiculous stories.’ ”

But he managed to sell the idea. “The producers in Hollywood will make a film about anything if they think it will make money,” George said. Production begins Monday in Johannesburg.

Justice has been slow for many in Rwanda. Trials at the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, have dragged on for more than eight years, resulting in just a handful of convictions. A rural justice system called gacaca was introduced in Rwanda about 18 months ago to clear the backlog. But a genocide survivors’ group, Ibuka, said last month that three potential witnesses were recently killed.

The genocide was the climax of the long-running tension between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes, an animosity exacerbated by Belgian colonists who considered the Tutsis superior. Under the Belgians, the Tutsis had better jobs and other opportunities, which stoked ethnic hatred.

The genocide flared after Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana -- a Hutu -- died when his plane was shot down in April 1994. Hutu extremists then called for all Tutsis to be killed.

“The Rwandan genocide had particular resonance because it was just viewed by the West as this tribal event: They slaughtered each other and that’s it,” said George, who hopes to gently educate audiences about the colonists’ role in creating the conditions for the slaughter.

While George and producer Alex Ho took center stage at the news conference publicizing the United Artists film Friday, a quiet, modest, almost reticent figure sat on the sidelines. Clad in a neat navy-blue suit was the story’s real-life hero, Rusesabagina, who has received numerous awards for his bravery.

“To me, the film is a message to the world and it’s a very nice thing that this message will be told,” he said after the event.

George said the film won’t pull punches in condemning the world’s failure to stop the killing, which he called Africa’s holocaust, but the bloody machete violence will be muted.

“I’m not going to make a horror movie. What we are going to do is to let the audience experience events more in their own heads than what they see on screen. It’s a love story. It’s certainly not a documentation of the chronology of the genocide,” he said.