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I watched it earlier on DVD. I felt uneasy watching it, because I can remember vaguely in 1994 when this stuff was going on. Not the political details, but I remember it being on the news, and I remember in 1995 when I was 12, a priest who'd been in Rwanda coming to our school to encourage us in our fund-raising efforts for Rwanda.
He showed us photographs of people's houses wrecked and bloodstained. No corpses or anything, just the mess, but he told us stories of neighbours hacking each other to death with whatever they could get their hands on, kids our age killing men, women and children, and kids our age being killed or watching their families be hacked to death.
I'm glad the film didn't get too graphic with the killing, because I don't think I'd be able to watch it in the context, where the world sat by and let it happen. It was sickening enough to watch the film, and see the uselessness of the Western world as they debated between "genocide and "acts of genocide" while people were being massacred.
In saying that, the film isn't about the genocide, it's set within the genocide. Everyone should watch this film. If you're around my age, maybe you'll remember Rwanda being in the news, around the same time as innocent people were being massacred in Yugoslavia and the world sat on its hands then too.
Watching the film made me feel useless and stupid for not being able to do anything. A similar situation has been going on in Sudan for the past couple of years and we're still sitting on our hands doing nothing.
Even if you're not really interested in all of that, you feel closed off to that kind of thing, it's still a good story, somewhat like Schindler's List. Don Cheadle is superb. The film doesn't go into a whole lot of political detail, it just filters down information which represents key plot points, the isolation felt by the people involved as the West eventually abandons them adding to the hopelessness of the situation.
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