Picture this

By Jason Cowley
March 12, 2005
A scene from the film <em>Hotel Rwanda</em>.

A scene from the film Hotel Rwanda.
Photo: Supplied

Hotel Rwanda is one of several new movies about that country's genocide. But can telling a story ever be the same as telling the truth, asks Jason Cowley.

In April last year, on a trip to Rwanda, I borrowed a car in the capital, Kigali, and drove on red dusty roads through some of the most verdant and undulating countryside in Africa to the quiet southern university town of Butare.

Throughout that journey I kept seeing small groups of men, sometimes laughing as they ambled together along the roadside, sometimes riding bicycles or travelling on the back of open-top trucks, all dressed in the same distinctive pink cotton shirts. Who were these men? They were, I was told, the killers, the "genocidaires".

Having been released from prison in the spirit of reconciliation they were now, in their tens of thousands, slowly being reintroduced to a society that remains traumatised by the events of a decade earlier.

Over a period of 100 days beginning in April 1994, more than 900,000 people, mostly from the country's minority Tutsi group, were slaughtered in a state-driven assertion of Hutu supremacy that the rest of the world, turning away in fear and revulsion, did absolutely nothing to stop.

The world's failure to intervene in Rwanda was a moral outrage. It was a failure, in the end, of imagination and fellow feeling - a failure to imagine how it felt to be living and trapped in Rwanda at that particular moment in time. In his fine book about the genocide of 1994 and its aftermath, We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families, the American journalist Philip Gourevitch suggests that before the killings in Rwanda can be properly understood, they must first be imagined.

"What fascinates me most in existence," he writes, "is the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real."

The massacres in Rwanda were real enough and there are, at present, no shortage of artists - film directors, novelists, scriptwriters - engaged in the complicated process of trying to imagine exactly what happened over those 100 days in 1994, in all its desolating detail, and then recasting it in fiction.

As well as the much praised Hotel Rwanda, nominated for three Oscars, two other notable films about the genocide have been recently completed: the BBC Films production Shooting Dogs, with John Hurt in the lead role as a Catholic priest struggling to save the lives of Tutsi children, and Sometimes in April, directed by the Haitian Raoul Peck.

A fourth film, the very low-budget 100 Days, was released in 2001, but was never widely distributed; and a fifth, a French-Canadian production of Gil Courtemanche's remarkable novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Canongate Books), is soon to begin shooting, possibly in Rwanda.

What is one to make of all this Western interest in the unhappy central African state? Is there not something indecent in the haste with which non-African filmmakers are competing with each other to be first with the cinematic news about the events of 1994? Is there not an element of atrocity tourism at work here - as well as a kind of stylised poetic of misery? After all it took the long perspective of many decades before novelists and Hollywood felt able to represent, in fiction, the Jewish Holocaust.

Theodor Adorno once wrote that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. By this he meant, I think, that the monumentality of the Jewish Holocaust overwhelmed and defeated even the artistic impulse. There are those I know, especially in Africa, who think that the Rwandan catastrophe is an inappropriate subject for fiction. It is still too recent and the suffering of the victims - the bereaved, the orphans, the women who were raped and infected with HIV and AIDS - is too great.

There is the issue, too, of the fragility of the country itself, which is presently being reconstructed by President Paul Kagame. He is an ethnic Tutsi who grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda and whose Rwandan Patriotic Front, attacking from their bases outside the country, led the liberation of Rwanda in the summer of 1994.

The tall, thin, ascetic Kagame is the first president to abolish the divisive system of identity cards, introduced by the Belgian colonisers, under which each citizen had to carry proof of his or her ethnicity: Hutu, Tutsi or Twa.

I spent much of the past week watching the various movies about Rwanda and rereading Courtemanche's book, as well as reading a forthcoming novel by Andrew Miller, The Optimists, which uses the Rwandan catastrophe as a back story.

The first thing to say is that none of these art works is exploitative or irresponsible. They each seek to explain and inform - sometimes clumsily, or, in the case of Sometimes in April, exhaustively - about the origins of the conflict: the Belgians' policy of divide and rule, the role propaganda played in inflaming ordinary Hutus, the instability created inside the country in the early 1990s by the Tutsi-led RPF's desire to topple the Hutu dictatorship of President Juvenal Habyarimana. More troublingly, they each seek - especially Hotel Rwanda, which enthrals like a thriller - to entertain.

Hotel Rwanda was directed by Irishman Terry George and tells the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (impressively played by the American actor Don Cheadle), a former general manager at the four-star hotel Des Mille Collines in Kigali.

Rusesabagina was a Hutu, though married to a Tutsi, and through bravery, cunning and well-placed contacts in the Rwandan military and among the murderous Interahamwe militia, he kept the hotel operating throughout the killing rampage as well as saving the lives of more than 1000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus who were hiding out there.

The story of Rusesabagina - also well told in Gourevitch's book - has the simplicity of myth: a heroic last man putting others before himself in a time of chaos.

"For some time I've wanted to make a film about Africa from an African perspective and I thought that film would be about Liberia," says George. "Then Keir Pearson brought me the script of his story about Paul. I went to meet Paul in Brussels, where he now lives. The more I listened to him describe what happened, the more I realised it would make a good feature film. A thriller. Then I had to set about finding the funding."

Much of the action takes place behind the walls of the besieged Mille Collines hotel, which gives the film a feeling of intense claustrophobia. You know what is happening beyond the gates - the killing and the maiming and the raping - but you never really see it. Instead, there are mere suggestions of horror, such as newsreel footage or when Paul drives out to trade favours with the leader of the Interahamwe in Kigali. In the murky background of his compound we glimpse Tutsi women, trussed up in cages, who are being used as sex slaves.

"Making the film, I felt obligated to be as truthful as possible," George says. "I didn't want to manipulate the story. I know for many people my film will be their point of reference for the Rwandan genocide, just as my way into the Cambodian genocide was through a film - The Killing Fields.

"I want my film to be instructive, I want to generate discussion and for people to learn from it, which is why the violence is underplayed. I wanted teenagers to be able to see my film and for it to become the starting point for a wider discussion about the failure of the West to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and now in Darfur."

George chose to shoot Hotel Rwanda in Johannesburg - partly because he was operating under financial and time constraints ("I knew I was in a race to bring my film out first") and the available infrastructure was superior in South Africa, but also because, he says: "I was afraid of recreating those scenes of murder on the streets of Kigali. I was not comfortable with that idea."

Shooting Dogs, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and produced by David Belton, was filmed exclusively in Rwanda. A friend, who lives in Kigali, watched the filming with interest. "I thought there was something indulgent and wrong about the circus of activity created by a Western film crew in the midst of such dire poverty," he says. "And some of us felt upset about the filming of the scenes of violence and mayhem. Perhaps Hotel Rwanda's approach of having the violence in the background is the right one."

Shooting Dogs is based on the siege at the Ecole Technique Officielle, in Kigali, where more than 2000 Tutsi men, women and children sought refuge from the killing frenzy. They were initially protected at the school by a Belgian-led peacekeeping force, which, because of United Nations equivocation, was ultimately to be rendered helpless to prevent their murder.

The troops had no mandate to "enforce" the peace, nor could they shoot unless someone first shot at them. In the end, they evacuated the school, which was encircled by the Interahamwe, taking the white Europeans who were there with them. The Africans were left behind to be murdered, slashed and mutilated with machetes.

Shooting Dogs is a hugely distinguished film: absorbing, enraged, desolating. The story is told largely from the point of view of two English characters - the obligatory white leads in so much Western cinema about the European encounter with Africa - in the form of the priest (Hurt) and an idealistic young teacher (Hugh Dancy) who believes he is in the country to do good work; but there is nothing sparing or sanitised about it. Its gaze is not softened for Hollywood. The setting and locations, the large African cast, including many locals, who speak Kinya-rwanda in the film, the uncompromising violence and the pervading sense of fear and menace give the action a grainy authenticity.

David Belton was working in Rwanda as a producer for BBC's Newsnight during the killing frenzy of 1994. "For years afterwards I knew I wanted to do something with my experience," he says now. "I tried to write a non-fiction book, but that didn't work. In the end, I wrote, with Richard Alwyn, the treatment on which the script of Shooting Dogs is based."

How did he feel about returning to Rwanda to recreate, as a filmmaker, the murderous events he had witnessed as a young journalist? "We were determined from the beginning that the film would be made in Rwanda. I know the country well and I knew that there was a strong desire there for the truth of what happened to come out. It was their story; we felt we could be there to help them show it. You do not meet anyone in the country who has not been affected by what happened."

That is true enough. But why make a drama rather than a factual documentary? "Why?" he says, pausing to order a cup of tea in the cafe where we are sitting. "Because I believe drama can reach a deeper place than any pure documentary account ever can."

Gil Courtemanche said something similar when I asked him why he chose to write a novel about his experience of Rwanda. "The question about fictional truth and journalistic truth is quite simple for me but also very complex," he told me. "For example, I could answer that both are the same. What I mean is that the facts are the same, only the story differs. Good dramatic narrative and good journalism are the same: they create a story with reality. The reality is always there and is the same. The point of view about the facts becomes the reality."

Courtemanche is a French-Canadian journalist who made a celebrated television documentary about AIDS in Rwanda, a subject never mentioned by any of the films. While in the country he befriended many people, Hutu and Tutsi, most of whom died in the genocide. In his novel these lost friends return from the dead, only to be murdered all over again in devastating scenes of violence and suffering.

Though there are many shifts in perspective, the main character is a French-Canadian journalist, an exhausted libertine called Bernard Valcourt whose experiences are informed by those of Courtemanche himself. In Kigali he stays at the Mille Collines hotel - where else?

But his Mille Collines is different from the hotel in Terry George's film: it is seedy, dissolute, boisterous with corrupt Belgian businessmen, lascivious French paratroopers, AIDS-stricken prostitutes and Paris-returned Hutu plutocrats, who plot genocide as they order whisky and cigars. Meanwhile, out in the hills, Rwanda seethes and burns. The killing season is beginning.

Working at the Mille Collines is a young waitress called Gentille. She is a Hutu but, because she is tall, slim, fair-skinned and beautiful, her father, ashamed of his ethnic inheritance, has encouraged her to pass as a Tutsi, as a member of the once-ruling minority group, first under the old pre-colonial feudal system and then, initially, under the Belgians, before they switched favour to the majority Hutus and sought to politicise ethnicity in Rwanda.

She and Valcourt begin a relationship, rendered with rare fervour. Their happiness is fragile; out there in the distant countryside Tutsis are being slaughtered. Soon, one by one, Valcourt's friends are swept away in the frenzy.

I have seldom read a novel in which the link between sex and death is so insistent. Courtemanche's book has been called obscene, pornographic and wilfully offensive. Yet what could be more obscene than what happened in Rwanda, where the Interahamwe employed rape as a weapon of mass destruction?

A Sunday at the Pool has been criticised for its political inaccuracies, bad history and slight mockery of General Romo Dallaire, courageous commander of the UN assistance mission in Rwanda.

This would matter if Courtemanche had written a work of reportage or non-fiction. His work would then be assessed by the same criteria that one applies to any work of fact: it would be assessed for truth and fidelity to source material.

But fictional truth is different; it has less to do with whether something is factually true than whether it is true to the life created within the fiction.

In this important sense, Courtemanche speaks the truth, humanly, about love and sex in the face of annihilation and, in broad sweep rather than in particular detail, about what happened in Rwanda during those terrible months of 1994.

Each of the three films about the genocide - and, to a lesser extent, the Courtemanche novel - ends with a vision of continuity, of the exhausted survivors moving beyond the calamitous present towards a more stable and hopeful future. In doing so they offer the audience a sense of consolation for what has gone before.

"The story of Paul Rusesabagina was hopeful," says Terry George. "He helped to save many people and he and his wife survived."

"We couldn't have sent the viewer home utterly devastated," says David Felton. "You simply cannot do that to people."

I watched Hotel Rwanda in the company of several Tutsi survivors. They liked the film and were moved by it. One of them, who had seen it before, confessed that watching the film had caused her to weep and to have nightmares.

Another, Apollon Kabahizi, who works for the Aegis Trust, the charity that helped to fund the building of a memorial centre in central Kigali, said: "This film was entertaining, it was Americanised, with that Hollywood feel. But it is a very important film in terms of helping people learn more about what happened in Rwanda. It is accurate and shows you what ordinary people are capable of doing if the political environment is right."

He paused, and then began to speak, without prompting and very openly, about his own experiences, about the murder of his family. "One day, I said to my best friend, who was a Hutu, 'Do you think you can pick up a machete and cut me with it, just because I'm a Tutsi. Is that something you can do?' "

"Of course not," he said. "Are you sick or something?" But this same guy, my friend - well, I discovered later that he had killed my mother. My mother fed him; she brought school books for him because his own mother had died. He was my best friend. That's what genocide does."

Joseph Habineza, minister of culture in the Rwandan Government and the individual who decides whether international film crews can work in the country, had seen Sometimes in April, which had its premiere in Kigali, and was eager to see the other films.

I asked him if he was concerned that the story of his country was being appropriated by Western artists for an international audience that may not fully understand the causes and antecedents of the catastrophe.

"I am very encouraged that these films are being made, especially those that were made here in Kigali, because they used local actors and technicians," he says.

"In 1994 the world ran away from us. The world didn't want to know. These films, because they have a sense of history and a powerful message, are coming out at the right time because the world is starting to forget what happened. And we don't want people ever to forget what happened in 1994. Will ordinary Rwandans see the films? Many won't, of course. But they know that they are out there, they know that they have been made. That is a source of consolation - and stops them feeling abandoned all over again."

- Observer


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