sophie okonedo

Janet Planet

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Janet and Lacy

Janet Planet is interesting on all sorts of levels but the title is a good place to start. Because the film is really concerned with Lacy, a girl of about 11 who is withdrawn and self-absorbed, friendless and a bit weird but sweet, smart and nice with it. Why she has no friends seems like a mystery and by the end of the film it remains largely unanswered, but writer/director Annie Baker gives us clues – the big one being Janet, the planetary object around which Lacy orbits, her mother. This is Baker’s first film, and the debut also of Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, but most of the rest of the cast … Read more

Hotel Rwanda

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Nick Nolte and Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 April Rwandan genocide starts, 1994 On this day in 1994, a period of mass killing lasting 100 days started in Rwanda, during which around 20% of the country’s population was killed. The violence was organised by the government, targeted against the Tutsi tribe and carried out by members of the Rwandan army, the police, as well as government backed militias and members of the Hutu population. Between 500,000 and a million people were killed, largely by machete, as neighbour turned on neighbour, the Hutus gaining the land of their Tutsi neighbours once they’d murdered them. The grievance of the Hutus … Read more

Hotel Rwanda

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Nick Nolte and Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda

In 1994, 800,000-plus Tutsis were butchered by their Hutu neighbours while the West debated whether this was genocide or merely isolated “genocidal acts”– i.e. not serious enough to warrant intervention. A decade on and the conflict is beginning to arrive on cinema screens, and most of the attempts to turn a dark day in human history into screen entertainment are taking the Schindler’s List approach – finding the rare good thing in a sea of bloody mayhem. As has director Terry George in this effectively realised true story about Rwanda’s own “Schindler”, Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who risked his Hutu hide to save upwards of 1,000 Tutsis. This is an incredibly tense … Read more