The displaced victim. Cinematographic representations on the Rwandan genocide

The Rwandan genocide was introduced in the Western world through films and the media in general; however, the fictional film productions about this genocide pose a paradox: of the ten films produced to the moment, none has been produced by a Rwandan filmmaker. These films being Western productions entail several questions: If these films are Western productions, how do they introduce the Other: the Hutu, the Tutsi, the victim, the survivor, Africa, the kinyarwanda language? In this way, it is interesting to reexaminethe relations between cinema and colonialism and inquire into the hypothesis that fictional films about the Rwandan genocide are but an update of the colonialist cinema. In order to make a first approach to these questions, this article will take three representative titles -Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), Shooting Dogs (Michael Caton-Jones, 2005) and Un dimanche a Kigali (Robert Favreau, 2006)- in order to study them comparatively.