Friday, March 04, 2005

The Movie is the Message

Has the movie, "Hotel Rwanda" helped the people of Darfur???

The Movie is the Message: "Hotel Rwanda is an act of memory against forgetting, a reminder to the world -- from presidents and policy makers to ordinary people in front of their TVs--that it turned away as 800,000 people were butchered, in plain sight, in 100 days. (There's a quiet but telling moment in the film where an American photojournalist, on viewing film footage of a massacre, sadly observes, ' 'people will see it, say 'Oh, that's awful,' and go back to their dinners.' And so it proved.) And it's a summons to act now -- to give meaning to the words 'Never again.'
Even before the Oscar nominations, the film had generated a great deal of public and private interest, thanks in large part to a publicity team comprising, in addition to PR types, humanitarian organizations and nonprofits dedicated to grassroots change. Amnesty International has had the largest hand in advocating for Hotel Rwanda, its effort spearheaded by Bonnie Abaunza, the director of Artists for Amnesty, a program that, as the name suggests, promotes Amnesty's work through the arts.
When she first heard about Hotel Rwanda, Abaunza approached MGM/United Artists with a proposal: Amnesty would mobilize its membership to promote the film; the film, in turn, would help generate interest and contributions for Amnesty's biggest current campaign: the fight for humanitaritan relief and international action in Darfur, Sudan, where an ethnic cleansing campaign has caused tens of thousands of deaths and made refugees of more than 1.8 million people. The UN has called the conflict the worst humanitarian crisis in the world; millions are expected to die of hunger and disease anyway. Although response to Sudan has been better than response to the Rwandan genocide, says Abaunza, it still falls short of what is needed. "

For a gripping video interview from Lt. General Romeo Dallaire on a first hand account of the massacres in Rwanda please check out this link (it is definitely worth checking out!) :
Click on the link: http://www.booktv.org/publiclives/index.asp?segid=5391&schedID=333.
Then click on where it says "watch."

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