'Hollywood has got it wrong'
2006-04-18 11:23
Kigali - 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.
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 characterised 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.
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 UN troops abandoned more than 2 000
Tutsis to be slaughtered by machete-wielding killers.
It has also been criticised 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.
"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 co-ordinator of Rwanda's
Survivors Fund charity.
The makers concede a degree of artistic licence 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 criticising the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda.