Modern Day Issues Portrayed In The Movies Hotel Rwanda And Traffic

The films from today covered in the course include Traffic and Hotel Rwanda. The early 2000’s was a tragic time for the United States, with a devastating terrorist attack that effected so many lives. Pre 9/11, the national discussion was the war on drugs and its multibillion-dollar trade. Traffic captured three storylines that were loosely intersected about the characters of the film and the impact their decisions made on their families. We see in the end how they all connected to each other. It also showcased the war on drugs in our national politics. The decriminalizing of drugs sparked new conversations after the movie came.

Repealing draconian drug laws of marijuana began to be more of a topic of discussion after the war on drugs and films like Traffic and is even decriminalized in the state of New Jersey. The clear message from the film is that the U.S antidrug policy focused too much on the supply rather than the demand and abused crude tools of punishment from law enforcement. Hotel Rwanda was a movie about the genocide of the Tutsi people and how the world turned its back towards them. It’s clear in the movie how even the U.N turned its back on the tragic events happening in Rwanda because they saw African people as less than and on the bottom of the totem pole. The fact that this film didn’t win an Academy Award for Best Picture is absurd. The other films in the category that year were The Aviator and Finding Neverland, while both great movies, emotionally Hotel Rwanda just hit home in every aspect.

Traffic hits the war on drugs dead on with different perspectives on all fronts. We see the lives that drugs have affected from the federal agents to the drug lords and their families, to the people hooked on these same drugs. The film shows the reality of the war on drugs. Several stories unravel over the span of a month and focuses on the new drug lord Robert Wakefield and his spiraling daughter. Meanwhile, the film cuts to Tijuana and shows an honest police officer that fights against the corruption that’s all around him.

At the same time showing a San Diego suburb where a pregnant wife uncovers how her family really makes their money. While the film showed most angles of the war on drugs it failed to show the damage it can cause to one’s life in terms of the pains from withdrawal and the journey it takes people to get treatment. The reality of the police in Mexico is that they’re less likely to be quiet heroes like the film portrayed them to be and more likely to be kidnappers for cartels moving the drugs throughout the United States. The film suggests that the war against drugs are lost but we know in reality that the supply of narcotics has decreased and therefore there is less violence on the streets than before the crack down on drugs by law enforcement.

Hotel Rwanda on the other hand shows a war against humanity has human rights were violated and left to be extinguished. It is important with a film like this to understand the historical contexts on what led up to this devastating civil war. The film was based on the genocide of the Tutsi people over the course of 100 days in 1994. Almost one million Tutsi’s were massacred by the Hutu people, both of which natives to Rwanda. The Hutu’s were the majority people in Rwanda and after their independence from Belgium in 1962 there was a lot of violence and vengeance between the two ethnic groups.

The film makes it seem as though the distinction between the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s were racial when in fact, before Belgian colonial rule, the distinctions were primarily economic. The Hutu’s were the elite and the Tutsi’s were the common folk. When the Belgians colonized the nation, they favored the Tutsi’s over the Hutus which caused even more civil dissonance. While many Tutsi’s fled to exile into surrounding countries, in 1990 there was a failed invasion of a Tutsi rebel exile group that sparked the civil war.

The Rwandan president was a Hutu whose plane was shot down and the incident was immediately blamed on the Tutsi’s. After that, all hell broke loose, the Hutu militia invaded all of Rwanda and slaughtered the Tutsi’s and moderate Hutus. All of this was happening, and the international community did nothing. The U.N who is supposed to aid in all human rights issues said that they were basically less than nothing, so they left the country taking all “important” people with them. The film shows the courage of a man in the midst of this genocide who did everything in his power to save his people. It goes to show that you can be anyone and instill change and save lives of the people around you.

These films touch on the issues of today. Human rights violations and inequality is at the forefront of many conversations as well as the war on drugs. They showed the people impacted by careless decisions and bigotry. We must continue to fight against the corruptions and evil in this world to be sustainable as we are all just humans living in it. Justice and peace should be the goal of everyone so if we work together towards this common goal, there is a greater chance we will achieve it.