the awful truth; Joan Juliet Buck reviews a fine film about Rwanda and Fat Actress, the new series that is 100 percent tabloid.(Sometimes in April)(Movie Review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April, on HBO March 19, is an intense and heartbreaking film about one of the most horrifying and shockingly unopposed genocides of the twentieth century. The film has an elegiac grace and an overwhelming tension as it focuses on one man, Augustin, and his family. His wife, Jeanne, says, "Come on, wake up, nobody's safe in the country." Their daughter Anne-Marie is in a catholic boarding school; the two boys are at home. Augustin's brother Honore, a star journalist at the local radio station, is broadcasting hate and inciting his side to kill. On the night of April 6, a handheld mortar brings down the president's plane, and the bloodbath begins.

It is 1994, and we are in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, where in 100 days close to a million Tutsi were massacred by the ruling Hutu. Jeanne is a Tutsi, and Augustin a Hutu. The Hutu army is preparing to counter the Tutsi rebels' Rwandan Patriotic Front; in the Rwandan military compound the soldiers, among them Augustin, a captain, open fresh boxes of weapons. "Thanks to the support of our French friends," says the commander, a beret-wearing bully in dark glasses, "we have Kalashnikovs from Albania, Israeli Uzis, Czech grenades, M-16 rifles from the USA, guns and ammo from Egypt." Augustin finds machetes, which are not on the manifest. "From China," says the commander, "you have a problem with that? We have plenty of farmers out there who need to go to work."

"Going to work" is the euphemism for slaughtering Tutsis, and soon farmers in shirts and shorts, armed with machetes, are going to work, shouting "Kill the cockroaches." The unstoppable slide from ominous normality into truckloads of dead bodies is rendered with the matter-of-fact textures of everyday life. Soldiers arrive at the steel gate outside Augustin's house, and he's warned to leave because his wife is a Tutsi. Soon Augustin is hiding in his attic with his fellow soldier Xavier, while Jeanne and the children have been sent off with Honore in his SUV to the safety of a hotel. They don't make it, and Augustin's attempt to escape from his house with Xavier ends when a UN soldier refuses to allow them into his convoy. The UN forces are impotent; the United States, having lost eighteen soldiers in Mogadishu and having no "vital interests" in Rwanda, does nothing. Debra Winger plays Prudence Bushnell, the deputy assistant secretary of state, in a sort of self-contained bubble of ineffective Washington meetings, video conferencing, and a briefing in which a journalist asks of the rebels "are they Tutu or Hutsi. . . . which ones are the good guys?"

Augustin will survive, but his family will not; his brother will be put on trial by the UN, and Augustin will have to decide whether to hear him out. Raoul Peck, an acute and committed director of both features and documentaries who was briefly the minister of culture of Haiti, made the film in Rwanda, with a crew who had lived through the massacres. He lays out the impossible terrain of present geopolitics and the horrifying scope of the massacres with passion but without polemic, concerned not with the reasons for the genocide but with what it did to people. The helplessness of the survivor is played with vulnerable dignity by Idris Elba, a British actor, as Augustin. The women are exceptional: the beautiful Carole Karemera as Jeanne is a great actress who takes you from bourgeois grace to panic to the stark determination of Greek tragedy. Karemera was born in Belgium of Rwandan parents who fled the first massacre in 1961. The south African Pamela ...