Sometimes in April (2005)

[hengcs]

This movie created quite some buzz at the Berlin International Film Festival.

It will be screened on HBO on Mar 19.
;)
www.hbo.com/films/sometimesinapril/

I watched the "making of" on HBO yesterday ...
It looked more realistic and/or less drama than Hotel Rwanda.
However, I will postpone any judgment till I have watched Sometimes in April ...

[arsaib4]

Originally posted by hengcs
This movie created quite some buzz at the Berlin International Film Festival.

It will be screened on HBO on Mar 19.
;)
www.hbo.com/films/sometimesinapril/

I watched the "making of" on HBO yesterday ...
It looked more realistic and/or less drama than Hotel Rwanda.
However, I will postpone any judgment till I have watched Sometimes in April ...

Yeah, I heard quite a bit about it also when it played at Berlin. Too bad it's not being released theatrically (at least not to my knowledge) and I don't have HBO so I guess I'll have to wait until the film gets dumped on DVD.

[arsaib4]

While watching Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April, I was contemplating whether the film would've garnered as much acclaim as last year's Hotel Rwanda, or at least a little more than what it has in its current state, if it was released prior to that film. It didn’t take me long to figure out the answers to that once I finished the film: No. But the reason behind it is quite simple: Sometimes in April is a superior film in just about every way possible. If that didn’t quite make sense then we first need to acknowledge that most of us love heroic tales of men fighting all odds to preserve peace and stability. While Hotel Rwanda was an important film about the genocide which in 100 days took the lives of nearly 1 million people, no doubt about it, it was also an "action-filled" saga mostly relegated to one man, so that didn’t adequately allow the film to analyze the situation at large, and from various viewpoints. Peck’s film isn’t perfect, but it allows us some time and space to think about the various pertinent issues at hand. As Film Comment’s Olaf Möller rightfully points out, "[Sometime in April] approaches its subject less as a reconstruction than as a postmortem on political memory, carefully delineating the core contradiction and failures lying behind this humanitarian worst-case scenario."

Most will be startled with the similarities the latter bears to the former (the reason for most of them is quite obvious) as it establishes itself in the first half an hour or so. Our protagonist, Augustin (Idris Elba), is a Hutu army officer who is ambivalent regarding how to deal with the problem -- which is Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a renegade force mostly made up of Tutsi men who have descended upon them in the past. (It must be mentioned that it was the westerners, in this case the Belgians, who created this disparity between the people under their rule.) But the blood-thirsty Hutu’s now simply want to take extreme measures by eliminating any Tutsi living among them along with any moderate Hutu’s like Augustin. When Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane is shot down, the army gets free rein to do whatever they want. Augustin’s wife (Carole Karemera) happens to be a Tutsi (as was Don Cheadle's wife in Hotel Rwanda), so that creates a dilemma for Augustin. But he ends up convincing his radio-jockey brother (Oris Erhuero), someone who’s been spewing hate speeches, to take his wife to a safe compound while him and his colleague hide from their former counterparts. Augustin also has a daughter but she’s at a French Catholic school which is considered off-limits at first, but as once character rightfully puts it, "This was a war without any rules."

Director Raoul Peck, who delved into Africa previously with his brilliant Lumumba (2000), expertly cuts back and forth between the happenings from 1994 and the ones from a decade later when Augustin’s brother is tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania. But, instead of making his characters the mouthpieces for moral righteousness, he allows us an opportunity to silently watch one of our diplomats trying to explain the difference between "genocide" and "acts of genocide" as the killings go on while the rest of the world does nothing. Another great sequence involves a young woman at the pristine combines of the council detailing the brutality she’s suffered at the hands of those she trusted. Thankfully, what we don't have to suffer through is the parading of worried white faces like they were in Hotel Rwanda, and while Peck did create the character of a good-hearted American diplomat (Debra Winger), he perhaps did it to please the executives at HBO (film’s co-producer). The performances and the settings are as detailed as possible. There are some late dramatics in the film that it could’ve done without, but other than Ghosts of Rwanda, the astonishing PBS documentary on the subject, Sometimes in April is quite possibly the best visual account of this tragedy we have so far.


Sometimes in April - Grade: B+

__________________________


*As I mentioned in the previous post, the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival (in-competition) earlier this year. HBO Films decided not to release it theatrically; instead it played on their channel back in May, the same month it was released on DVD (http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007R4SYU.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg).

[hengcs]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by arsaib4
... if it was released prior to that film. It didn’t take me long to figure out the answers to that once I finished the film: No. ...


I agree ...

(1) The main reason is Hotel Rwanda is more dramatized (in terms of story telling) whereas Sometimes in April is more ambitious but less "exciting" ...

(2) Also, Hotel Rwanda had a vice nice song "Million Voices" which sounded at the right time ...

;)

[oscar jubis]

Sometimes in April (USA/France/Rwanda, 2005)

This expensive HBO production, written and directed by Raoul Peck, dramatizes the Rwandan genocide from the point of view of two Hutu brothers. Augustin is a military man with a Tutsi wife and three children. After the moderate president is killed, Augustin is branded a traitor (and listed as such) for failing to join extremist Hutus bent on the anihilation of the minority Tutsi population. Although his radio broadcasts incite Hutu extremists to violence, his brother Honore agrees to try to bring Augustin's wife and sons to a safe place. Unlike his best friend, Augustin manages to stay alive as he travels outside the capital to look for his daughter, a Catholic school intern. Augustin won't learn about the fate of his wife and sons until years later, when Honore is finally captured and tried for his participation in the genocide.

Sometimes in April is handsomely mounted and effectively dramatized, but it often takes a didactic, leaden approach. There are scenes in which characters become little more than position mouthpieces. Perhaps to take advantage of the availability of Debra Winger (as a government official) and because of HBO's target audience, the film gives undue importance to the position of the US government with regards to these events. In actuality, the UN and the governments of Belgium and France played more significant roles, and were more strategically positioned to stop the genocide than the Clinton administration. Sometimes in April lacks the poetic dimension of older Raoul Peck films, particularly his excellent The Man by the Shore. Moreover, the cloying and portentous musical score never ceases to dictate how one shall feel. It's unnecessary, given the tragedy on display.