Hotel Rwanda

When I saw the trailer for this film a couple of months ago, I really expected it to be terrible, ill-informed and exploitative; it appeared to be combining the worst elements of Behind Enemy Lines and Schindler's List. Happily, not so - actually this is a very good film, well worth watching, very good acting and a well told story.
My fear is that people might regard watching it as equally value to reading a book or even watching a documentary about it. The same danger that watching Schindler's List might be mistaken for an understanding of the Nazi Holocaust.
This does not mean of course that these films have no value, but that it is a mistake to think that they are something more than they are.
I was a little disappointed by one of the captions at the end of the film that read "The genocide ended in July 1994, when the Tutsi rebels drove the Hutu army and Interhamwe militia across the border into the Congo." Fine, but how about what happened next?

Cinema can be powerful, intense and moving. But we must see it as a complement to, no subsititute for, more detailed analyses.