In Shake Hands With The Devil theThis film adaptation of the Romeo Dallaire's autobiography "Shake Hands with the Devil" details the personal journey of Dallaire through the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It reveals how the United Nations ignored Dallaire's request for more aid.
In Hotel Rwanda the film is about some of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind took place in the country of Rwanda--and in an era of high-speed communication and round the clock news, the events went almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. In only three months, one million people were brutally murdered. In the face of these unspeakable actions, inspired by his love for his family, an ordinary man summons extraordinary courage to save the lives of over a thousand helpless refugees, by granting them shelter in the hotel he manages.
There are two layers in the films, the obvious, and the underlying layer. The first being the overall situations, which is the war amongst the people. Where one of the clans is trying to terminate the other clan. Then comes the second, deeper layer. Which is how most people assume that the UN did next to nothing to help these people. In actuality, the peacekeeping force there did as much as they could, but they were never helped from their superiors, and no one came to help them, they got no back up what so ever. What amazes me is how, despite these odds, they still stood on the threshold of life, simply trying to defend these people as best they could, and countless lives were lost.
Characters can easily represent darkness in films and stories, but in these films it's not just one or two characters, but an entire clan of people. This shows us how if one person gets a simple idea, an idea as simple as killing off these people, and can sell this idea to his friends, then this eventually leads to a huge movement. I don't think I even have to mention this, but this is easily connected to Hitler and the Nazis in world war II and how they tried to kill all the jewish people.
I was able to make numerous connections in regards to these films. The biggest being the movement happening in Libya. The people of Libya have lived under totalitarian, and despotic rule. Now they are making a grand statement in an attempt to over throw the leaders of those countries to follow the human desire to live in freedom and liberty. You would assume that this would make news headlines around the world, and that people would be jumping out of the houses trying to save these people, but as a society, it seems we're more interested in watching Charlie Sheen trip out on drugs, rather than another genocide happening.
Finally I connect this all to the essential question: How does the media shape our view of the world? This is where I found the movies to be extremely powerful. The media has an imense control of the world. Which is pretty scary of a thought. The media determines nearly everything we learn about whats going on in the world. While with the increasingly growing popularity of the internet, this is becoming less and less of a problem, back when this happened, almost no one knew. Had they, then I assume this entire mess would have been solved in a matter of hours.
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