Search - Sometimes in April on DVD

One Hundred Days of Hell!

Mr D. | Cave Creek, Az United States | 08/17/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

It's not easy to watch a movie about genocide. It's not even easy to hear news accounts of these kind of atrocities but that doesn't mean they shouldn't make these kinds of movies. No, by all means, horrific brutality and indifference to life should be memorialized. The perpetrators should be shown for what they are, young, idle, power hungry, sociopaths, not unlike the street gangs and terrorists we presently face.

The Rwandan Genocide

The Rwandan Genocide killed almost a million Rwandans of both Tutsi and Hutu ancestry(?) The Hutus outnumbered the Tutsis by almost six to one but had historically been subservient socially and economically to the Tutsis.

There is really very little difference between the tribes who share a common language and history and had gotten along well and been intermarrying for four hundred years. Physical differences had almost disappeared totally when Belgian colonialists, who had taken over the country from Germany after the First World War, started categorizing the population as either Tutsi or Hutu based on their version of physical traits. Still even though arbitrarily ethnically divided, the newly defined Huts and Tutsis got along fairly well, even though the Tutsis were the Belgian darlings and had been put in charge, via a monarchy.

This changed in the sixties when the sister countries of Rwanda and Burundi received their independence. Hutus outnumbering the Tutsis took control of the government and lashed out at their oppressors, killing thousands and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring countries. Eventually a group of Tutsi ex-patriots decided to take their country back by forming the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) and invading Rwanda in 1990.

This set the stage for the murder and mayhem of Tutsi and so called collaborating Hutus, including the systematic slaughter of innocent women and children which took place in the spring of 1993. This is the setting for one man's story in the movie Sometimes in April

I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like to go through something like this, yet thousands of survivors must have witnessed or heard about their wives, husbands, brothers, mothers, sisters, fathers, sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, in laws or friends butchered like vermin. There was no mercy, no humanity, no hesitation, only grim determination to wipe out all vestiges of the Tutsi tribe from Rwanda.

Our hero, Augustin (Idris Alba)- I really don't know whether to call him a hero but being a Hutu and former soldier, on the run from fellow Hutus, made him seem like one - lost his entire family and his best friend to the madness that was present in that spring in 1993. His brother Honore, (Oris Erhuero) was complicit in the rampage as a radio personality exhorting and inciting the mobs that roamed the streets and countryside of Rwanda but he got to see the results of his evil deeds first hand, while trying to perform his only good deed, witnessed the murder of his two nephews. His sister in law was wounded and he later managed to get her to church refuge, where she later died.

Augustin, after seeing his friend Lionel shot to death in front of him, manages to find safe haven in a hotel (Not the hotel in Hotel Rwanda but didn't know his families whereabouts. He later finds and starts to take care of Jeanne, (Carole Karemera)the woman who tried to save his daughter, both of whom were part of a mass gunning in the Catholic school she attended. Eventually in the present time Augustin finds out from his brother, jailed in neighboring Tanzania, what befell the rest of his family.

The story was told from present time with Augustin reflecting back to his ordeal. Saying there was a story is probably a misnomer. The story in the early part was denial, escape, helplessness, hide, resolve, hunt, terror, cruelty, kill, finality, death, SURVIVE and in the latter part anguish, melancholy, memories, hope, loss of hope, apathy, move on, SURVIVE.

Conclusion

This movie was a colossal downer, though the story did need to be told and viewed. It lasts some two hours and twenty minutes but it never dragged. The film moved along well and held my interest the whole time. I thought the director, Raoul Peck, did a magnificent job and even though this was a made for TV (HBO) movie it never seemed low budget. The acting was nothing short of sensational. The fear was palpable as was the anxiety and other emotions.

As you might imagine hundreds if not thousands of actors participated on both sides of the line dividing good and evil. I couldn't get over the cavalier attitude of the young executioners, their total disregard for life. I noticed they kept referring to their victims as snakes or cockroaches as if calling them that made them less then human and made them feel more like exterminators. I'm sure this is the mindset that took place in all previous genocides and the current extermination going on in Dafur, Sudan."

A moving and unsentimental film

Flower Girl | northeast | 03/24/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"While Hotel Rwanda has certainly received more press than Sometimes in April, I think this film stands on it's own as an accurate and gritty account of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994.

With the exception of the U.S. Government scenes, Sometimes in April is exteremely well acted. It is certainly bloodier and more violent than Hotel Rwanda and it portays the terror of the situation in a more matter-of-fact manner. One has a real feeling of dread and tension watching this film.

I really feel one should watch both movies as they compliment one another tremendously."