By Dave Kim

HISTORY HAS HAD its fair share of social injustices, but few are as infuriating as those that were seen, assessed, and promptly ignored by the rest of the world. Coincidentally, those chapters in history are the ones we forget most easily.

In 1994, nearly a million Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were massacred in broad daylight, tens of thousands a day, while the rest of the world's military forces looked the other way. Eleven years ago many Americans might've been too busy following O.J. and Nancy Kerrigan, or assessing the merits of Green Day's Dookie, to pay attention. Or, as a journalist in Hotel Rwanda muses, we saw the genocide footage on the evening news, said, "Oh my god, that's horrible," and went right on eating our dinners. Director Terry George's latest project isn't a comprehensive history lesson or even a balanced, third-person document of the genocide in Rwanda, but it is a stinging reminder of what happens when politics turn violent.

George, who has a penchant for writing (In the Name of the Father) and directing (HBO's A Bright and Shining Lie) films with political themes, doesn't flog us with gruesome imagery to refresh our memories, but the effect of this personal, family-centered true story is just as, if not more, powerful.

Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) is general manager at the plush Mille Collines hotel in Kigali, Rwanda. After a career of stroking guests' egos and accumulating favors, he's become the go-to guy in his neighborhood, the man with friends in high places. Meanwhile, political tensions in Kigali are running high, as furious Hutus march for their assassinated president, Juvenal Habyarimana. The Cuban cigars and bottles of Scotch Rusesabagina has discreetly issued to military officials go a long way, but the shrewd manager is adamant about saving favors for his family alone (though he is Hutu, his wife and in-laws are Tutsi). As for everyone else, Rusesabagina is sure someone will intervene before the aggressions escalate into anything serious. After all, the United Nations troops are still in town.

Unfortunately, hate propaganda gets around quick in Rwanda. One of the film's most disturbing elements is a local talk radio host, an omniscient, nameless Hutu voice who charges listeners to round up Tutsi "cockroaches" and "cut down the tall trees." George peppers these eerie broadcasts throughout the film, foreshadowing its climactic moments and effectively setting a disquieting mood. A film about genocide challenged with a PG-13 rating, Hotel deftly swaps shock tactics (severed limbs, dying children, rape) with chilling sound clips and dialogue. In one scene, an apologetic U.N. colonel (Nick Nolte) explains to Rusesabagina why the United States and the rest of the world are turning their backs on Rwanda: "You're not even a nigger. You're an African."

Radio messages are quickly followed by rampant butchery, and Tutsi bodies pile up by the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Rusesabagina manages to save his own family from the killers, hoping help will come soon for the others. But when the U.N. does nothing to quell the violence, he opens the hotel doors for more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees.

As the beleaguered Rusesabagina, Cheadle turns in the most nuanced performance of his career. His fear and escalating frustration never stumble into the showboating traps that flag so many other unsung-hero routines. The one pep talk he gives to the "guests," a subdued yet deeply urgent call for resistance, is the anti-Braveheart monologue. Still, Cheadle's character firmly remains George's focal point – and while many will attack the film for concentrating on one man rather than on the countless slain, Hotel is strongest when Rusesabagina and his family are in the spotlight. It speaks of the genocide through a real-life protagonist (Rusesabagina served as adviser to the film) who, in the bigger scheme of things, didn't save the country but made a life-and-death difference for 1,268 of its people. Oskar Schindler immediately comes to mind for comparative purposes, though Hotel's temporal scope (not vision) is less comprehensive than Spielberg's elegy to the Holocaust.

The mass murder itself is somewhat muted in the film; George pinpoints its resonance instead. We only briefly see Rusesabagina tripping over piles of dead bodies in a thick fog, but his shaken reaction to them back at the hotel is considerably more unsettling. The few scenes of beatings are violent, of course, but there are no sensationalistic bloodbaths, like the Soweto uprising scene in Cry Freedom or the Amritsar Massacre in Ghandi.

Narrative movies that deal with real atrocities are often inherently flawed: to insert historical events could easily chip away at a central story line, but to omit them would do injustice to history itself. Hotel too has its sincere-but-underdeveloped side plots, such as threads involving the Red Cross, a helpless orphanage, and the white press, but it remains very much a suspenseful drama, not an "important" political-spectacle film. In effect, it's a work that doesn't give us the whole tragedy, just enough to carry its dramatic premise. But the glimpse of humanity (and lack thereof) is inerasable, and, despite the film's definitive postscript, we're left to find out the full story ourselves.

'Hotel Rwanda' opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.