Hotel Rwanda

A must watch, I would say. The movie is really gripping, sometimes seems very surreal but when you come to think of it, all that was shown in the movie happened in reality. The movie is about how a Rwandan hotel manager exhibits extreme courage and saves nearly 1200 people during the 1994 massacre in Rwanda. Rwanda is just one example in Africa there are so many others like Somalia, Nigeria and Siearra Leone that have been marred by civil wars and genocides. The international community's help has always been on a convenience basis and the UN is just a joke. You must watch this movie to understand the ground reality of what the peace keeping forces really do/get to do. Nick Nolte who plays a UN commander says in the movie "We are peace keepers and not peace makers".

Don Cheadle who plays the hotel manager does an excellent job, he is just a ordinary man with no super human abilities, he still doesn't give up and does all that he can to save as many. The movie dipicts the Hutu/Tutsi (class) conflict, it interesting to know how this class conflict evolved. The conflict has some colonial history, with the Germans/Belgians/French exploiting the Rwandans for their own profit. There is some palpable humour too in the movie during sequences where Paul(Don Cheadle) tries to intimidate the RPF commander making him believe that the US is watching everything from the satellites and that he would be prosecuted for war time crimes if he doesn't help him. Another interesting thing is that the RedCross in the movie are shown using the maruthi(Omni) for transportation :-) I didn't know that Maruti even had such markets outside India.

Anyways, here are some links if you want to know more about the whole Rwandan conflict:
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp (too long)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide (short but misses some history)