Hotel Rwanda

Cast: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Desmond Dube, Hakeem Kae-Kazin and Joaquin Phoenix

Director: Terry George

Running time: 120 minutes

Age restriction: 13MV

Rating: 8 out of 10

The world has recently been commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. It was an atrocity that so shocked humanity that the United Nations passed laws to the effect that if genocide was perpetrated, there was a legal obligation from the international community to act.

And yet governments did nothing when sectarian violence erupted in Rwanda in 1994, resulting in the death of a million people in 100 days.

But how do you capture the magnitude of such horror? Director Terry George has done a brilliant job by focusing on the true story of one man who refused to be caught up in the maelstrom of euphoric butchery and also refused to sit back and do nothing.

Hotel Rwanda tells of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the hotel manager of the Milles Collines Hotel in Kigali. He's efficient at work and a devoted husband and father. He's from the ruling Hutu tribe while his wife is from the rival Tutsi tribe. Politics is the furthest thing from his mind.

When the bloodbath explodes, thanks in large measure to a Hutu radio station which urges listeners to "kill the cockroaches", Paul turns the hotel into a refuge. He was directly responsible for saving the lives of more than 1 200 people by bribing the Hutu military to spare them.

The film works as well as it does because of the brilliant and flawless performance by Cheadle. You feel his quiet restraint beginning to wear down and experience his near breakdown as the strain begins to take its toll.

There are also fine performances from the rest of the cast including Sophie Okonedo and Desmond Dube as Paul's right-hand man.

What the viewer feels is shame that no one cared about an African country that had no rich resources. A spokesperson from the US State Department does verbal somersaults to avoid saying the word genocide and thereby be forced to intervene.

Nick Nolte as the impotent US peacekeeper points out just how little Paul and the Rwandan people mean to the rest of the world when he says: "You're not even a nigger. You're an African."

Terry George cleverly ensures that the film never turns into a horror bloodbath. He recreates the psychological atmosphere of genocide rather than the visual.

Hotel Rwanda is an important African film - a picture that can truly carry this moniker unlike Black Hawk Down and Tears of the Sun. Most of it was filmed on location near Modderfontein and South African funding ensured that it could be made. This isn't why you should go and see it. It's a damn good film that will keep you engrossed - and make you think.

It was Edmund Burke who said: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

What is tragic for humanity is that here there was only one good man.