Hotel Rwanda | Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo

Hotel Rwanda | Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo | Powerfully Amazing!

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Hotel Rwanda

	Hotel Rwanda Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo average customer review:based on 320 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Once you find out what happened in Rwanda, you'll never forget. Oscar® nominee* Don Cheadle (Traffic) gives "the performance of his career in this extraordinarily powerful" (The Hollywood Reporter) and moving true story of one man's brave stance against savagery during the 1994 Rwandan conflict. Sophie Okonedo (Dirty Pretty Things) co-stars as the loving wife who challenges a good man to become a great man. As his country descends into madness, five-star-hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Cheadle) sets out to save his family. But when he sees that theworld will not intervene in the massacre of minority Tutsis, he finds the courage to open his hotelto more than 1,200 refugees. Now, with a rabid militia at the gates, he must use his well-honed grace, flattery and cunning to protect his guests from certain death. *2004: Actor, Hotel Rwanda

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I gave this as a gift. They were very pleased as they had been to Africa that year and said it depicted some of the areas they travelled.

Powerfully Amazing!

This movie is one of the most powerful of it's type. When it was first out, there were two other movies depicting the genocides and problems facing african nations. While each is very good, Hotel Rwanda is the best. It's simple story about a simple man saving hundreds of people, and the personal growth he experienced, reaches out across the Atlantic to touch all of us who watch it.

Paul's struggle to save first his family, then the hundreds who came to him forhelp, is very powerfully portrayed. I actually show this movie to my 9th graders as a lesson in non-print non-fiction. It has opened their eyes to what the rest of the world experiences and shows them more about what they've only heard bits and pieces of. many of them actually did their research papers on related topics, expanding on what they had learned.

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Powerful and stunning fictionalized (but fact-based) history

Don Cheadle, as Paul Ruseasabagina, the Rwandan Manager of a 4-star hotel which serves as a haven for Europeans and African Elites, gives a performance that is at once measured, controlled and deeply anguished. As a fact-based but fictionalized account, "Hotel Rwanda" captures the horror and absolute madness of racially-based war that had its origins in European colonialization when the Germans (and later the Belgians, to much more devastating effect) exalted the Tutsis (for the their more "European" physical characteristics) as the prominent ruling class over the Hutus. The ebb and flow of decades-long resentments finally came to a head in 1994, when close to a million Tutsis were felled in a horrific blood-bath--and all in the face of European and American indifference.

Cheadle's Ruseasabagina (a Hutu who is married to a Tutsi, played by Sophie Okonedo )first shows an unremarkable decency that ascends to heroic proportions as he risks the lives of himself and family, attempting to shield and help well over 1200 people--first by crowding them into his Hotel, a temporary "safe house" and then by bartering transportation away from the encroaching Hutu militia. The film's intensity is heightened by the fact that many surviving Rwandan refugees from that era were recruited as extras--essentially reliving, in a sense, a most horrendous nightmare. The movie also benefits enormously from provocative performances given by Sophie Okonedo (as Tatiana, his long-suffering wife); Nick Nolte who, as the near-ineffectual commander of UN peacekeepers, gets across the utter shame and disgust felt by many who were essentially powerless to stop the massacre; and Joaquin Phoenix in a bit part as a randy reporter who has an affair with a local Tutsi and then abandons her as casually as one would an anonymous call girl.

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