'Rwanda' writer gripped by story he had to tell

If you have not had the chance to see this movie, I would strongly urge you to do so. By the way earlier this week in this blog I linked to an interview with a general who was an eyewitness to the slaughter. That is a very powerful video that I would also urge you to link to. It is somewhere further down in the blog. If you can't find it email me.

'Rwanda' writer gripped by story he had to tell:

"His initial calls to people in Hollywood were met with dispiriting cynicism. People told him it was a genocide that no one cared about at the time and that they were not going to care about it now."

How wriong they were...

Pearson hopes "Hotel Rwanda" will be a starting point for moviegoers who will investigate the topic further and be moved by the stories like the ones Pearson heard that shook him to his core.

Over a four-hour dinner, during which his Rwandan companion never touched her food, a woman recounted how she saved her life and that of her 2-year-old son. She lived in the bush behind her house for two weeks until she ran out of food and then turned to a local militia head and, essentially, sold herself into slavery. The man, drunk and still covered in the blood of his victims, raped her nightly for two months.

"You sit across from another human being and they tell you a story like this, I felt incredibly indebted. I have to do something about the genocide, tell the story. ... You realize all this happened, we had the power to stop this, we just didn't have the will."