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Hotel Rwanda -- Response It Term Paper

The film thus shows an ordinary man, who, for the love of a woman, committed an extraordinary act of personal courage and selflessness. It shows much like Steven Spielburg's "Schindler's List" how ordinary people -- businessmen and husbands alike -- can do the amazing, when called upon by historical and personal needs. However, the true events depicted in the film are also somewhat shaming to the contemporary American viewer. It is saddening to realize how much of the events that transpired occurred during relatively recent years, and received almost no press, except the occasional mention in a tiny corner colum of the newspaper, when far less disasterous local events received coverage.

The film is horrifying, but not because it is graphic. It is poetic in its cinematorgraphy as well as realistic. For example, sometimes the director focuses on the weapons rather than the bloody bodies of those who have become the victims of the government and mililita...

Sometimes the film merely shows the cold and calculated expressions of the Hutu extremists rather than the faces of those who are soon to become their victims. Some of the violence is also reported secondhand, such as the stident government calls for more warfare over the radio or the testimony of international aid workers. The faces of the workers, who are horrified of what they have witnessed, speak as loudly as the images of the violence.
But because so much of the most graphic violence is of children, the events that are violently and explicitly shown stay in the viewer's mind -- for example, when the main protagonist Paul discovers his son in a state of hysteria, after the boy has found his Tutsi friend murdered. Paul resolves to protect his family and protect all Tutsis who seek his aid. One can only hope as a viewer, that, facing the horror of children and people in need, one would be able to show such courage, and to do the same.

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