Rwandan genocide on film.

The film Hotel Rwanda, which narrowly missed winning an Oscar this February, is just one of a clutch of recent films which tell the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The movie, directed by Terry George, who was also Oscar-nominated for In the Name of the Father brings to the screen the true story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), “ Rwanda ’s Schindler”, who saved over 1,200 people from Hutu massacre in the capital Kigali .

The BBC Films production Shooting Dogs, due to be premiered in May, stars John Hurt as a Father Christopher, a Catholic priest struggling to save the lives of Tutsi children from the machete-wielding Hutu militia besieging his school.

Meanwhile HBO recently premiered Sometimes in April, a film directed by Haitian Raoul Peck. It’s central character is a Hutu army captain, forced to relive the genocide when he receives a letter from his brother in Tanzania – detained because of his role as a broadcaster at a radio station which had spurred on the killings with propaganda.

And also currently in production is a film of the novel, A Sunday by the Pool at Kigali, by French-Canadian author Gil Courtmanche, in which a Canadian journalist develops a relationship with a young Rwandan woman who becomes caught up in the genocide.

There is a fictionalised element to each of these films, though each uses events and, sometimes characters, drawn from real life.

Paul Rusesabagina actually was the general manager of the four star hotel Des Milles Collines in Kigali . A Hutu, married to a Tutsi, he was able to keep the hotel running during the 100 days of carnage and managed to protect the lives of the 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus who took refuge there. It is intentionally a mythic tale of courage, says Director Terry George.

“For better or worse Hotel Rwanda and films like The Killing Fields, Missing and Schindler’s List become the popular version of history and therefore you want to try and get these stories out before they are buried, ”he told the BBC. “The bulk of the Western world either didn’t know about the genocide or actively avoided knowing about it. The key thing we hear when people emerge from the cinema is ‘how did I not know that this was happening?’”

Shooting Dogs takes as its scenario the real-life siege at the Ecole Technique Officielle in Kigali where 2,000 Tutsi men women and children took refuge from Hutu killers under the ultimately futile protection of a Belgian-led peacekeeping force.

According to director Raoul Peck, Sometimes in April includes composite characters of several people he met during his research for the film, but “every single line of this film, of the screenplay, is authentic and based on facts”.

“How the characters evolve in the 10 years of the duration of the film ... how they cope with the past, how the past is still present in their daily lives, what they do to react to that ... It is a witness to the Rwanda of today.”

Former journalist Gil Courtemanche, asked in The Observer newspaper why he had written a novel about the genocide, replied, “The facts are the same, only the story differs. Good dramatic narrative and good journalism are the same: they create a story with reality.”