Hotel Rwanda

I learned what the genocide in Rwanda was all about. It started because of the tension between two tribes in Africa. After the president of the country died after his plane was shot down, the one tribe set out to kill everyone of the other tribe. I learned that people experienced the genocide in many different ways. Imaculee's experience was much different than Paul's. Imaculee was stuck in a small bathroom with other girls unable to move much at all and not being allowed to speak. Paul was helping to save many people by hiding them in his hotel and providing for them. Paul used a lot of his own money and his own belongings in order to help others. In Imaculee's story, I learned that people can put a lot of faith into God and that things happen for a reason, like the fact that she came home from school for Easter, that is something that saved her life.
In my lifetime, I witnessed the tragedies of September 11th. I witnessed media from the TV, the internet, and the newspapers. I also heard "media," or stories, from other people. I think that the most reliable media was the news on TV, the articles in the newspapers, and articles on the internet that were from news sites. The media that I had a hard time believing was the articles that were placed privatley on the internet, because I didn't know how much authority the person writing the article actually had. It is also sometimes hard to believe things you see on the internet because pictures can be altered so much on the internet with all of the different photoshops on computers now days. It is also hard to believe things that you just hear other people talking about. When people are just talking their stories can change because they might not remember the facts exactly right or they may include their own interpretation and tell it as though it were factual. I think that the most emotional ones were the stories on the TV, the news, because you were able to see pictures and sometimes pictures can say more than words, because you can actually see the suffering. These are also what I remember most vividly because of the pictures, they stick with a person longer. I don't think that it the media changed how I looked at the event because without the media I most likely wouldn't have known about September 11, except if I heard others talking about it.
I think that it is very important for directors to stay as close to the truth as possible because for someone who hasn't ever heard of the event otherwise will tend to take what the movie says about it as factual. For example, if I wouldn't have heard Imaculee talk about the genocide, I would have believed that how the genocide was portrayed in the movie as the truth of how everything actually was. I understand that directors and writers need to change some details to add suspense, drama, or excitement to movies. However, they need to stay close to the truth because many people put a lot of faith into movies that say they are based off of real life scenerios and they will believe everything that the movie says, as though it were the truth.