megawimp

If you really want to find out a bit more about the genocide in Rwanda of 1994, this is THE movie to go! It's a wonderful, yet uncompromisingly sad and bitter movie. Whereas "Hotel Rwanda" was more like Schindlers List in Africa, more focusing on a Hollywood-like hero & love story, "Sometimes in April" leads you right into the very depths of hell. The characters are well pointed out, the acting is always impressive and the film-making is very subtle and pleasantly calm. the only thing really which I could complain about to a certain degree was the sometimes a bit too prominently set musical soundtrack. Still - this movie is unforgettable; for one simply because of its honest attempt to tell the story of what happened in Rwanda, when the world literally turned its head - and on the other hand I feel the deepest respect for the team involved in making this for their seriousness and adequacy. A very daring and important movie!

To keep it short: What really turned me down was that the makers of this movie or maybe rather the writer of the script didn't have the courage to focus on the events of the genocide in rwanda as such. Why couldn't they just try and show the mere barbarism of what really happened. Like the catholic church of rwanda got involved in massacres, like last days neighbors became murders over night - and the dimensions of the genocide itself which were unseen of since the shoa. 800'000 to 1 million people slaughtered within 3 months, for the greater part with machetes and other tools - very little of this does shine through the almost romantic story of a brave and pure man. Sometimes I think that such stories rather use events like the rwanda genocide for a historical background only: The main story seems to be this of heroism where in fact a mass killing among neighbours was going on in rwanda. what fits this picture is the way the rebels of the rlf are glorified in the end of the film. in fact, after they had kicked out parts of the hutu murder gangs, they started intense killing based on racist projections too. it is still unknown among historians how many the killed then, but figures may go up very, very high. But as I said - maybe the actual events aren't that important for hero-movies like this. What I liked about the film was the role of the u.n. and the post-colonialist governments as portrayed in "hotel rwanda": in fact the international community witnessed over months the mass murder.