Sometimes in April

CinemaSerf

I think sometimes when we see eye-watering statistics of wartime casualties, we begin to become a little santised to their effects. Just how could the Hutu and the Tutsi manage to slaughter 800,000 of their own countrymen? It doesn't seem plausible, and yet it happened - and here, Idris Elba leads a cast of competent acting talent as his "Augustin" takes us on a bit of a fragmented but effective tour of this genocide. Rwanda itself is one of those countries crafted by post-colonial Europeans (in this case the Belgians) who loved to draw lines dictating where one nation started and stopped, paying scant regard to tribal ancestries and difficulties. Usually ensuring that their friends were left in government, resentment soon boiled over as the president is assassinated and the Hutu descend on their "cock-roach" foes and any from amongst their own numbers who urged reconciliation. "Augustin" is a military man who has hitherto lived well enough with his family, but now he has become separated from his much less fortunate brother "Honoré" (Oris Erhuero) and is faced with having to - quite literally - execute orders that he abhors. It's that inner conflict that is the source of the narrative of this often quite ghastly watch. For reasons that I didn't find entirely helpful, auteur Raoul Peck has us dancing about with the timelines and so whilst that avoids us just getting a day-by-day chronology of misery, it does give us a bit of the end at the beginning and so robs the film of an element of it's personal jeopardy. That said, though, this is stil a potent and powerful drama that illustrates the brutality of mankind when fuelled by feelings of hate and loathing that go back generations. The difference is, though, that generations ago their weaponry was much more rudimentary unlike in the early 1990s where bullets and jeeps rendered every corner of this country susceptible to random attacks by those only loosely affiliated warlords under the general command of Paul Kigali. On the diplomatic front, this chooses to focus more on American attempts at mediation - thanks to Prudence Bushnell (Debra Winger), and her own characterisation goes some way to capturing both the horrors of war and also the ineffectiveness of the UN's hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned blue-caps whose presence was only ever tokenly respected. There is a great deal of violence here and though it's not as graphic as it might have been, a combination of subtle photography and creative sound editing leaves us in no doubt of the grimness faced by a largely rural and uneducated population dealing with the equivalent of a bullet-fuelled scythe traversing the nation. It is not a documentary, and there does appear to be quite a bit of historical simplification and creative licence taken here - but if it inspires people to delve deeper into this atrocity then Elba, Carole Karemera and Abby Mukiibi Nkaaga - as well as whole host of enthusiastically convincing local civilians, have done their jobs well.