Hollywood action movie about Rwanda

For those post related to Burt Reynolds and throwing balls.

Is this movie in bad taste ?

Yes, it is in bad taste.
8
36%
No, it will bring light to a neglected cause.
14
64%
 
Total votes : 22

Hollywood action movie about Rwanda

Postby Moosehead » Tue Oct 26, 2004 7:58 am

Hey all, haven't followed the board for ages.

Thought this might be of interest.

http://www.mgm.com/ua/hotelrwanda/

I cannot believe that this movie is even being made, let alone months after the 10 year mark on the massacre. It seems terribly ironic that mass media is trying to now make money off events they refused to publicise when they actually happened.

I can only hope it does something to bolster public opinion on stopping genocide in still raw Africa.

I read LGen. Romeo Daillaire's book on the events (he seems to be played by Nick Nolte) and was moved at the injustice/stupidity of UN/western nation policy. As far as I can see Rwanda in '94 was hell on earth and no one was very interested in interfering. Anyway, if you haven't seen this check out the preview.

Cheers,

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Postby kilroy » Tue Oct 26, 2004 9:13 am

theres still some nasty shit going down in africa, and surely more nasty shit will go down in the future. hopefully this might raise people awareness on the subject, but it is doubtful.
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Postby mach1 » Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:37 pm

So are you saying even a documentary would have been in "poor taste"?

Maybe you are confusing the delayed reactions of the 'world' to genocide
and the distaste that ensues when you ascribe cynical motives ($) with the efforts of film makers to help spread a message and enlighten,educate and inform.

Only someone like Idi Amni would feel "entertained" by such a film, true, but, since world news documents news as it happens on a daily basis...not everyone wants to sit down or pay money to see a documentary.

Making a film about it invites a larger audience in to understand events as they happend with a dramatic context and twist and storyline.

If that what it takes to spread a message about mans inhumanity to man
then so be it.

From what I have heard, Rwanda is now quite a different place than when Romaire left it a shelled out version of his former self.
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Postby ReptilianKittenEater » Tue Oct 26, 2004 10:33 pm

this is what Holleywood Blockbuster about Rwanda should be...

Directed by Bruckheimer

Perhaps Ahnold could grow a mustache and pass for Romeo Dallaire

Have Snoop doggy and 50 Cent as Hutu guerillas.

Have Jesse Ventura and the cast of Oz as Canadian peacekeepers

Christopher Walken has a 2 minute walk on bit as an ambassador of some country

Jean claude Van damme and Dolph Lundgren as Belgian peacekeepers


In this version, a heavily armed UN detachment with artillery and Apaches and Sea Kings fights off the Hutu rebels and every lives happily ever after.
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Postby el3so » Wed Oct 27, 2004 7:28 am

mach wrote: Maybe you are confusing the delayed reactions of the 'world' to genocide and the distaste that ensues when you ascribe cynical motives ($) with the efforts of film makers to help spread a message and enlighten,educate and inform.

Making a film about it invites a larger audience in to understand events as they happend with a dramatic context and twist and storyline.

If that what it takes to spread a message about mans inhumanity to man
then so be it.
Saw the site and sounds like a "Schindler's List-isation" to me.
Don't think Spielberg made that one for free and all the proceeds went to Simon Wiesenthal-Centre or similar though. Would be nice if he did but I kinda doubt it.

What "lesson" were we supposed to learn in that movie anyway? That evil German camp commanders still got plenty of nookie?
I think most people able to afford a cinema ticket kinda agree on the whole 'genocide = bad'-issue...

Yep, saw a guy loose both his legs at the time and I didn't do nothing but hey, I bought him a band aid 10 years later. He's probably still f*cked, haven't seen him since but at least I feel a little better.
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Postby el3so » Wed Oct 27, 2004 3:09 pm

2Charlie wrote:el3so,

lost his legs where?
2Charlie, was ment as a figure of speech to show how much Hollywood's or movie-go'ers "caring" will help the victims of the Rwanda genocide.

Only real-life incident I witnessed was a buddy that crashed his motorbike, he lost only one leg though, the one caught between his steel horse and the lamp post.
Apparently chicks don't dig all scars...
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Postby rogueshark » Wed Oct 27, 2004 11:50 pm

Apparently it opened at the toronto film festival and got excellent reviews
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Postby ReptilianKittenEater » Thu Oct 28, 2004 2:10 am

rogueshark wrote:Apparently it opened at the toronto film festival and got excellent reviews


Won the audience award
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Postby Alessandro » Thu Oct 28, 2004 8:31 pm

Blame the white man, neighbouring countries did squat to stop it.
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Postby Kapa » Thu Oct 28, 2004 9:03 pm

I've only heard good things about "Hotel Rwanda", of course people who were actually there like 2Charlie might think it's a load of bollocks, or might not. As with all films I'll wait till I see it to make my own judgement, reviews are well........reviews. When alls said and done, at least someone's had the balls/nerve to finally make a feature about Rwanda that will reach a wider audience. P.s The guy who wrote the screenplay is an Irishman who penned "In the name of the father" and the exellent recent "Bloody Sunday" (correct me if I'm wrong).
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Postby mach1 » Sat Oct 30, 2004 5:49 am

Average Customer Rating:

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali > Customer Review #1:
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A Poignant Lament

A beautifully written story, which is more autobiography than fiction, but I suspect no newspaper was interested in this journalists eye-witness account of a people betrayed in a preventable Holocaust. Cushioning what happened in Rwanda in a work of fiction is the only catharsis Gil Courtemanche could achieve. In his dedication of the book, he names those in real life whom he does not disguise with pseudonyms in the actual story, and as it turns out, the lovely but tragic Gentille was a very real person. Originally written in French, none of this journalists imagery and lyrical phraseology is lost in Patricia Claxtons English translation. Maybe she even enhanced it.
At first, Courtemanches description of the Canadian UN Force Commander as the "weak general" angered me for, from todays perspective, it is an unfair judgment, but if I were in this journalists shoes at the same time in history with the same background knowledge he had then, I too would have been furious at the UN generals apparent ineffectiveness to prevent the genocide of a race, the Tutsis, and their moderate Hutu sympathizers by extremist Hutus that followed. I was in Rwanda in 1994 covering the humanitarian relief program for UNIMIR. I arrived at a time when we finally had a different perspective of this "weak general." The UN refused to give him permission to take action, and he has suffered inconsolable guilt as a result. Nevertheless, this "weak" general risked his life and his career to stay with the people he came to love by disobeying the UNs command to come home once the genocide began. He was told to let the civil war take care of itself. He and his small Canadian Force willingly disobeyed orders and refused to leave, and he telephoned a Canadian CBC broadcaster every night so the News Room could hear the screams as he gave a nightly report. Eventually the Tutsi rebels achieved what the UN did not-overthrew the barbarian hordes orchestrating the genocide-to make it safe for replacement UN Forces to land in Kilgali. Millions of Hutus, fearing retribution, flooded the borders of Zaire and finally grabbed the attention of CNN. By this time, the UN and Canadian Military did not dare court martial the general and his small band of Canadian peacekeepers, who stayed and risked massacre to bring humanitarian relief and eventual retribution. This general was not "weak." His UN masters--particularly the US and France on the Security Council--made him and his UN mission powerless. Theres a great difference. Maj. General Romeo Dallaire (whom Courtemanche never names in the story) had courage few military commanders on UN missions have shown today. I feel Courtemanche could have added a footnote, as he does with many historical explanations for what he writes, to clarify his original perception of the "weak general."

Once I read the story I had to leave it until I could deal with the memories in writing a review of "A Sunday at the Pool in Kilgali." The love story of a Canadian foreign correspondent, Bernard Valcourt, and the beautiful Hutu, Gentille, who had Tutsi features and elegance, is set against the societal corruption exemplified by those who gather around the local hotel pool: relief workers, Belgian peacekeepers, Rwandan middle-class, refugees and prostitutes. Here, the middle-aged Valcourt observes the disintegration of society turning on itself, while the adoring love of his much younger amour brings him alive. They plan their wedding in the midst of carnage, but eventually he cant protect her. During an escape attempt, members of the Hutu militia assault him and capture Gentille. In real life, Courtemanche never learned what happened to Gentille, but Valcourt finds her after the genocide ends-a ruined, broken woman dying of AIDS, who begs Valcourt to leave her to die in peace.

The love story takes on a life of its own as Valcourt attempts to explain what is happening to the world around him thats falling apart. There are many passages like these: "Watch out-men are turning into dogs and worse still than dogs and worse still than hyenas or the vultures on the wind making circles in the sky above an unwary herd."

In light of death, Courtemanche emerges a philosopher. The white man tries to teach the African to live, while he waits to die--most often because of AIDS. What the white man fails to realize, he writes, is that you can live only if you know you are going to die. Says one character, Cyprien: "You think we dont value life as much as you. So tell me, Valcourt, poor and deprived as we are, why do we take in our cousins orphans, and why do our old people die with all their children around them?"

There is much we can learn from the people we marginalize in Africa.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali > Customer Review #2:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So You Think Youre World Travelled and Educated....

After reading this book, I realized how naive we all are. This book is a frank portrayal of the Rwandan tragedy - a human tragedy - and how poverty, AIDS and famine bring out the best and worst in us all. We are them. They are us. It is a love story as well as a political and historical primer.
This book should have made the NY Times best seller list based on the amazing love story alone. The historical events in Rwanda are a bonus to readers (you actually learn something while you are being otherwise entertained). A must read. You wont put it down once you start, and you will buy more copies to share with others.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali > Customer Review #3:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An important book about the genocide in Rwanda

Bernard Valcourt is a somewhat cynical Canadian who lives in a hotel in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. As a kind of an development aid worker he tries to set up a television channel and make a movie on AIDS. On Sundays he sits at the side of the swimming pool and writes down what he sees: pompous Rwandans, ex-pats whose lives are centred on booze and cheap sex. He falls in love with the beautiful Gentille, a Hutu woman who is build as a Tutsi, and together they see how Rwanda changes into a hell in which people are butchered by their neighbours simply because they are or appear to be Tutsi ("cockroaches" as they are called by the militant Hutu faction) or just because the military guys are drunk and feel like slaughtering somebody. They see how friends and acquaintances around them die, but refuse to believe that total madness will break out. In the end they stay too long.
This book is described by the author as a documentary rather than in novel, in which he wants to draw attention to the almost forgotten genocide (and also describes the spread and consequences of AIDS, another mass killer). At the time of the genocide I was in neighbouring Tanzania and even there we did not have an idea about the extent of the slaughter in Rwanda. A gruesome book that is very important, well written and it explains very clearly what happened in Rwanda in 1994.

See also

http://mostlyfiction.com/world/courtemanche.htm

----


When truth is plainer in fiction
August 9, 2003


http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/ ... click=true


Image
Photo: PIERRE LONGTIN
Gil Courtemanche tried to call friends during the Rwanda massacre. He spoke to a man who must have been one of the killers.

Journalist Gil Courtemanche found fiction was the only way he could tell his story about the massacres in Rwanda. He tells Jane Sullivan why.

Gil Courtemanche dedicates his first novel to seven friends who are dead, four "unsung heroes" still alive, and "Gentille, who served me eggs and beer and could be dead or alive, if only I knew".

All these people live on in his book, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. He feels as if he has made them a gift of new life. After 800,000 murders, it is the least he can do.

After four decades of reporting facts, the French-Canadian journalist has turned to fiction as the only way to tell a true story that is almost unbelievably hideous: the Rwandan massacre of 1994 that was designed to destroy the country's entire Tutsi population. Men were slashed to death with machetes; women were raped, mutilated and left to die; children were murdered or had their feet cut off so they would not grow up to be soldiers; ribbons of corpses lined the streets of Kigali.

Other journalists have written non-fiction books about the genocide - notably Philip Gourevitch, the American reporter who visited The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival in 1999 with his poignantly titled book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families.

Image


Courtemanche's book is probably the first fictional account. To show the power of fiction, he talks about his daughter when she was young, saying that she found it very hard to understand the Holocaust. Then when she was 14, she told him: "Now I understand." She had just seen the film Schindler's List.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali spent more than a year on the Quebec best-seller lists, won the 2001 Prix des Libraires for outstanding book of the year, has been sold in 15 countries and is being made into a film. Enthusiastic reviewers have compared it with the work of Andre Malraux, Albert Camus and Graham Greene. "It will leave you battered and shaking deep inside," said one.

About to turn 60, Courtemanche finds himself hailed as a great new author of the accusatory novel. Interviewers in his native Montreal portray him as "an astringent personality", "an irascible, fire-breathing, take-no-prisoners kind of writer", drinking black coffee and smoking in his favourite cafe.

We have to imagine the cigarettes and coffee part because he is talking on the phone from Paris. He is eloquent, his English is excellent. There is no fire-breathing.

Courtemanche comes from an "average" Montreal family of seven. His father sold insurance. He says he has been expelled twice: from school, when he was 17 ("I organised a strike at 12. I was first in my class but a bad influence.") and in 1985 from the Canadian Broadcasting Company ("for the same reasons as school").

He first went into journalism for La Presse, the main daily in Quebec, when he was 19. It was the start of a 40-year career in print, radio and television that has taken him to wars and trouble spots around the world. "I was kind of ignorant; I began to cover war because nobody wanted to go," he says. But what began by accident has turned into a compulsion to be a witness, to make the world take notice.

The origins of his novel go back to 1989, he says, when he first visited Rwanda. He had the luck to make the right contacts straight away, fell in love with the physical beauty of the country and made many friends.

He was to go back for a total of five visits. Two years before the genocide, he made a documentary, The Gospel of AIDS, about the clergy and church workers fighting to stop the rapid spread of the disease.

In Paris in 1994 he heard about the killings. "I realised that most of my friends and colleagues would be dead," he says. Either they were Tutsis or moderate Hutus who supported democracy and social activism, who were first on the militant Hutus' target list. He tried to call some friends: he realised later that one man who answered the phone must have been one of the killers.

When he finally got back into Rwanda in 1995, each day brought news of friends and colleagues who had been murdered. Courtemanche wanted to bear witness to the slaughter. He tried to make a documentary but could not find a producer. Some day, he thought, he would write a book.

One day in 1999, he was looking at some notes he had made on the first day of his first visit to Rwanda, as he sat by the swimming pool in the Hotel des Mille-Collines in Kigali. The bewildered reporter was observing a surreal enclave of expats, international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, and prostitutes. The jackdaws and buzzards hopping around the pool mirrored the human pecking order. "All around the pool and hotel in lascivious disorder lies the part of the city that matters, that makes the decisions, that steals, kills, and lives very nicely, thank you," he had written in his notebook.

These notes eventually formed the first few pages of his novel. As he sat typing them into his computer, the editor who had worked with him on his non-fiction books called and said "It's time you gave me a novel." Courtemanche said he was working on a non-fiction book about Rwanda. The editor warned him it would probably only sell about 200 copies. "Finally, I started writing about the pool and I don't know why, I put the name of Gentille there. I found out I was writing a novel."

With models such as Malraux's L'Espoir (on the Spanish civil war) and Greene's The Comedians (on Haiti and "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror), Courtemanche's way into documenting the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of anonymous Rwandans was to focus on the lives and deaths of a few people he had known well, during the three months leading up to the massacre. Although they can hardly believe it, they know that soon people will be cut down like weeds.

Courtemanche has kept the real names of both the murdered and the murderers. He had to invent some things because he did not have their testimonies: either everyone was dead or the families had fled.

The horrors of the murders are offset by a gentle love story between the hero, Valcourt, an ageing French-Canadian journalist something like the author, and Gentille, a beautiful young waitress he meets at the hotel.

In reality, Courtemanche says, there was no love affair: they hardly even talked. "I was struck with awe at her beauty, I could barely talk to her. At the time I was in love, and loyal to my love. And I thought, I'm just too old and shabby for a beautiful lady like that."

When he went back to Kigali, she had disappeared, like thousands of others. But Zozo, a hotel worker and a great survivor, later told Courtemanche that Gentille had been in love with the journalist because he was the only man at the hotel who had not tried to get her into bed.

Valcourt has the chance to leave Rwanda and take Gentille to safety, but he chooses to stay. Courtemanche has explained this through a story about his own life. He once took up with a Haitian woman, a doctor, and took her back to Montreal. But in Canada she was seen merely as a Third World woman who had used her husband to escape from Haiti, and the relationship did not last. When I raise this story on the phone, he is prickly - "How do you know about that in Australia?" He prefers to explain more generally that if Gentille had gone with Valcourt to Canada, she would never be seen as his equal.

Some "politically correct women writers" who reviewed his book have been "frosty" about the love affair, Courtemanche says. "They ask, 'How come a white man can write about the sexual life of a black woman'? But curiously enough, the black women I met in Rwanda come back and say, 'Thanks for writing that'. They whisper in my ear because they wouldn't like their husbands to hear."


The hardest thing for outsiders to understand is why the massacre happened. It was not just a matter of warring tribes. Courtemanche says almost everyone is to blame. First there were the Belgian colonists, who declared that the minority Tutsis, with their fair skin and European features, were the superior race of Rwanda. In a microcosm of the country's troubled history, Gentille's great-great-grandfather, a Hutu, makes sure his descendants intermarry with Tutsis so they will survive and prosper.

Then in 1959, the Belgians do a complete turnaround and decide that in a democracy, the majority Hutus are the race fit to rule. The seeds of hatred have been sown. Gentille, a Hutu, has the tall slender figure and face of a Tutsi and is thus in mortal danger.

Then, Courtemanche says, in more recent years there were the French, who knew what was going to happen but kept on supplying the Rwandan government with arms; the Americans, who insisted the word "genocide" should not be used so the UN would not have to intervene; and so on, right down to various weak or self-serving individuals gathered round the Kigali pool, including a Canadian consul obsessed with her golf game.

Courtemanche has been criticised for his fictionalised portrayal of the Canadian commander of UN troops in Kigali, General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire's hands were tied, say his defenders. But Courtemanche stands by his version of Dallaire's role, saying he could have intervened. "He didn't have to ask for permission . . . part of his mandate was to protect civil peace in Kigali. You don't have to call your boss to say, 'Is this peace or not?' "

And the UN troops were well equipped to intervene, he says. "They were soldiers of greater experience and quality than the Rwandan army, 60 per cent of whom had AIDS."

What would Courtemanche have done if he had been in Rwanda during the genocide? "I would have fled. Maybe at the beginning, some expatriates could have exerted some pressure on UN forces. But the moment the massacre was in full flood, there was nothing that could be done.

"If the Rwandans had been rich like the Germans, they would have built gas chambers. We tend to say 'Oh, these Africans, they are savage'. They are not savage. They are poor."

In Courtemanche's book, death and despair exist alongside the simple, robust pleasures of life: eating and drinking and lovemaking and fun. At first, Valcourt cannot reconcile this, but one of his Rwandan friends tells him he should enjoy himself too: "You have a duty to live." That's just what he was told, Courtemanche says. "We think about ourselves as having only one life. If something goes wrong, you hear people say, 'This is the end of my life'. But when you live with Africans, their lives are finished every day. They don't know if they are going to live the morning after. They begin a new life every day, every week, every month."

Some of his happiest memories are of events in the midst of death and chaos: a Christmas among the bombs in Beirut, a meal of wine and pate with Red Cross people on a mat in Ethiopia, with famine victims dying a few metres away. There was nothing more they could do, and they still had a duty to live.

He is working on two new novels. One is a fable about globalisation, which begins in Sydney during the Olympics. The other is based on his family: his father is very sick, and one family faction wants to prevent him eating what is bad for him, while the other faction supports him in indulging his one remaining pleasure. Courtemanche is calling this book A Beautiful Death.

Despite all the horrors he has witnessed, Courtemanche remains optimistic about human nature: "We're getting worse and worse in our capacity to kill, but better and better in our capacity to go forward."

Though the end of his Rwanda novel was "very tough, very emotional" to write, for the most part "there was some kind of peace in my writing . . . my mourning was done". And the book changed his life in an unexpected way. A young woman who wrote articles about non-government organisations came to interview him one afternoon. "The day after, we were living together. Last February we were married."
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Postby mach1 » Sun Oct 31, 2004 6:27 am

I heard somewhere a whole calvacade of journo's werent sleeping too well at night because they too took off from where all the action was
and subsequently failed to report...I'll look into that further to verify.

What was the name of that one outstanding lady? Melvern?
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oh yes, here it is...

Postby mach1 » Sun Oct 31, 2004 6:29 am

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oh yes, here it is...

Postby mach1 » Sun Oct 31, 2004 6:30 am

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