Hard to watch, but worth it

“Sometimes in April,” which premieres Saturday on HBO, is the second movie in the space of a year to concern the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu extremists and those under their influence murdered more than 800,000 Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) within 100 days. “Hotel Rwanda” is its illustrious Oscar-nominated predecessor, and both will before long be joined by two more films on the subject, “Shooting Dogs” from BBC Films and the French-Canadian “Sunday at the Pool in Kigali.”

This coincidental bounty is surely due to the fact that last year was the genocide’s 10th anniversary -- there was also a PBS documentary, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” to mark the event -- though such overlapping projects are also eerily common in the film business.

You’d think genocide would be a tough sell, but whatever high-minded principles impelled their production, each of these films owes its life to a show-business executive somewhere deciding that it would make a good movie -- that is, a movie people will want to watch, or at least be able to last through and possibly recommend to their friends. A movie with some cinematic excitement. “Sometimes in April,” though ultimately rewarding, is indeed hard to watch, especially knowing that the re-creations on film are mere shadows of a worse reality. At the same time, it’s also true that a dramatic film, which encourages one-to-one empathy with its characters, can engage and affect an audience in a way that a documentary might not, dependent as the form is on mere reality, against which most of us are habitually steeled.

At the convincing center of “Sometimes in April” is a wonderful, weighted performance by British actor Idris Elba (“The Wire”), as army Capt. Augustin Muganza (an invented character). Like the actual Paul Rusesabagina in “Hotel Rwanda,” Augustin is a Hutu married to a Tutsi (Carole Karemera) and, being a reasonable person himself, blind to the unreason into which his country is about to plunge, even as he witnesses the training of a civilian militia, happens upon crates of machetes bought cheap from China and hears the radio constantly rumbling with barely coded threats against Tutsi “cockroaches.” One of those broadcasters is Augustin’s brother, Honor (Oris Erhuero), who will later face a U.N. tribunal for his rabble-rousing.

Shot in Rwanda by Haitian-born director Raoul Peck (“Homme sur les quais,” “Lumumba”), it’s less lavish than “Hotel Rwanda” but more convincing, ultimately -- more graphic, and more tragic as well. Where the former film spares every character of substance, “April” is full of death -- but also of rebirth and, for want of a better word, closure. We first meet Augustin 10 years after the fact, sadder and almost wiser -- the film runs on parallel tracks, in 1994 and 2004, the better to show how the social fabric was torn and is being tentatively repaired. Now a schoolteacher, he plays his class a videotape of President Clinton declaring of the genocide, “Never again must we be shy in the face of evidence” -- a statement that will gather irony as the film goes on and we see the lengths to which his administration, in the light of its Somalian misadventure, went to avoid taking action. (There is astonishing interpolated footage of State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelley, attempting to distinguish between “acts of genocide” and “genocide.”)

But the failure to intervene was international, and the film means to point a shaming finger in that direction, opening with a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

As his city explodes in violence, Augustin tries one way and another to get his family to safety -- the local goal is the Hotel des Mille Collines, the “Hotel Rwanda.” Though the filmmakers re-create some of the major catalyzing events, dramatically the film works best when it stays with Augustin, and you see only what Augustin sees and knows only what he knows, which is never enough. (You know bad things are going to happen, if you are a reasonably informed person, but not what bad things will happen to what particular people, so that the film remains suspenseful but also hopeful.)

Less successful, because more programmatic, are passages in which American officials debate what, if anything, to do about the situation, though Debra Winger does some good, naturalistic work as real-life Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, trying her best to influence her superiors in Washington and the Hutu leadership in Rwanda. And the final, cavalry-like arrival of the Rwandan Patriotic Front -- the rebel army that had been waging a civil war against the Hutu, and whose leader, Paul Kagame, is now the president of Rwanda -- plays a little too much like old-school socialist realism, as a soldier stops to care for an orphan. But these are small faults in a generally excellent film.

*

‘Sometimes in April’

Where: HBO

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Ratings: TV-MA-LV (may be unsuitable for children under 17 with advisories for language and violence)

Idris Elba...Augustin

Debra Winger...Prudence Bushnell

Oris Erhuero...Honore

Carole Karemera...Jeanne

Executive producers Raoul Peck, Joel Stillerman. Director and writer Raoul Peck.