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Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 802
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 - 11:02 am: | 
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Rwanda survivors say Hollywood has got it wrong By Arthur Asiimwe
Wed Apr 19, 8:17 AM ET
KIGALI (Reuters) - Three films in two years about Rwanda's genocide have shocked Western audiences with the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but many survivors in the tiny central African nation are unimpressed.
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They say the big-screen depictions of the carnage, when about 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of state-sponsored killings, have got the story wrong.
"My conclusion was that both movies are another Hollywood fiction geared at making money," said Jean Pierre Rucogoza, a 47-year-old university lecturer and genocide survivor who has watched "Sometimes in April" and "Hotel Rwanda."
Rucogoza lost 11 relatives in the killings. In an interview on the eve of the 12th anniversary of the genocide earlier this month, he said he believed the films partly represented the West's conscience rearing its head too late.
"But, unfortunately, they are also being used as a money-minting tool," he told Reuters. Many who lived through Rwanda's bloodshed say they are happy the films remind the world of the tragedy, but say the reality was different.
'NOT OUR STORY'
"'Sometimes in April' is characterized by very serious inaccuracies and omissions which made most survivors say, 'It is not our story'," said Francois Ngarambe, president of a Rwandan genocide survivors' association.
Directed by Raoul Peck, "Sometimes in April" tells of the plight of a Hutu soldier who is separated from his Tutsi wife and two children as violence engulfs the capital Kigali in April 1994.
Ten years later, he learns of their deaths from his brother, who was a presenter on a hate radio station urging the killers on, and is now facing an international trial.
Ngarambe said the film wrongly portrayed the genocide as largely the work of militia, neglecting the careful planning by the Hutu extremists in the government and the military.
The latest screen take on the genocide, and the only to be filmed on location, Michael Caton-Jones's "Shooting Dogs," had its world premiere at a stadium in Kigali last month.
It was filmed at the Ecole Technique Officielle, a school in the capital where Belgian U.N. troops abandoned more than 2,000 Tutsis to be slaughtered by machete-wielding killers.
It has also been criticized by some survivors, particularly for one scene where a white Roman Catholic priest decides to stay with the refugees, rather than be evacuated along with his expatriate colleagues.
Many senior church leaders were complicit in some of Rwanda's killings and the depiction angered many who already blame the United Nations and Western powers for failing to intervene.
SYMBOLS OF HEROISM
"There was never a situation, not at that school or anywhere, where a white person refused to be evacuated. That is a pure lie," said Wilson Gabo, a coordinator of Rwanda's Survivors Fund charity.
The makers concede a degree of artistic license with the facts of what actually happened at the school, risking inflaming tempers in a society where memories are still raw.
Amid international inaction, the genocide was finally ended by Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, who led a rebel army from Uganda to seize power. He has recently joined the film debate, sharply criticizing the Oscar-nominated "Hotel Rwanda."
Released last year, Terry George's movie stars Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu manager of a Kigali hotel where more than 1,200 people survived the killings taking place outside.
Kagame, a Tutsi, said the South African-filmed portrayal of Rusesabagina was a "falsehood," and he would not have picked him as a symbol of heroism in those tragic times.
"Some of the things actually attributed to this person are not true," Kagame told reporters last week. "Even those that are true do not merit the level of highlight."
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Uh,yeah, how long ago did Kola and everyone else mention this? Like, HALF A YEAR AGO?
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Kola_boof
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Kola_boof
Post Number: 2009
Registered: 02-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 - 11:54 am: |
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Scratch that Roxie.
I was part of the Videotaped "Boycott" of the film HOTEL RWANDA...in support of the African Women in Media group three months before the film first opened. That was way more than a year ago.
I loved "Sometimes in April", as I deeply love and admire the filmmaker Raoul Peck. He's my favorite of the new black filmmakers.
______________
Today is my first day at Studios 2 and 4 of NBC in Burbank, which is "Days of Our Lives". 
It's 9 am now, but I leave in an hour.
I still don't have a "job description".
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2090
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 - 01:23 pm: |
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Everybody likes to forget how the French set it all up-by selecting the Tutsis for their slender noses and aquline and European features and setting them up over the more African looking Hutu.
I don't condone slaughter, but every time the white man gets run out of a place his uncle toms get it in the neck--see Vietnam, Cambodia, France (German collaborators)--
And O yeah, see America where thousands and thousands of people who collaborated with the British during the revolution were killed, run out and had their property confiscated.
They had their hand in it and they are using it to try to horn back into Africa.
All of you who think they love the Africans get this---they would like to get rid of all of them save those they need to extract the minerals and if they have their way they will do it, too. |
Lil_ze
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Lil_ze
Post Number: 86
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 - 10:08 pm: |
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chrishayden, it was the belgians and the germans who began the racial politics in rwanda. not the french. but if the africans (rwandans) are stupid enough to buy into the white mans way of thinking, then they deserve all the civil war, death, and destruction they have. nobody said the people in rwanda had to believe everything the white man told them, they CHOSE to buy in to it. if the white man leads no one HAS to follow. |
Doberman23
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Doberman23
Post Number: 327
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 - 07:01 am: |
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lil-ze "they deserve all the civil war, death, and destruction they have"
no one deserves that lil-ze, there are way too many people who are innocent of all the politics and die in the mix. your comment is like saying that everyone in the twin towers incident deserved to get it because american politics. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2094
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 22, 2006 - 10:35 am: |
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Oh, but at the time they did. They could follow or die--but of course, sitting here comfortable where you are, you will say they should have died.
Then the man jacks up your gasoline prices and you pay without a whimper.
Hey, I suppose you can tell that to all the black people here dying their hair blond, trying to go to Harvard, get jobs on Wall Street, dealing dope, pimping, etc etc etc.
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