Sunday

Originally uploaded by Scootie.

Sunday was filled with a great variety of activity and emotions.
The day started (at 12pm) with a BBQ around George's place. Some old friends of ours were in town from Perth for a while and took the opportunity to arrange a big get-together of all the old gang from the late 80's :)
As it turns out, most of them have been spending their time having children :) lots and lots of happy children. It's quite funny, because you don't really think about it, until you're in one room and realise that 1-3 kids per couple, and 5 or so couples, ends up being a lot of kids :)
Can anyone ever truly say that kids aren't cute? I guess it's a survival trait or something :)
The whole thing was excellent, and I was able to spend a lot of time catching up with people and seeing what everyone's up to. The food was sensational, thanks to George's three skewer spit, so it was spit roasted lamb and chicken and home-made dips :)

Sunday evening I went to see a movie at Fed Square with Kate. It was part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, and it was a film called Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire and is a documentary about the UN General who lead the peacekeeping force into Rwanda and was there at the time of the Genocide portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda.
It was quite an open portrayal of an extremely disturbing incident in history, where human beings performed inhuman acts to one another, and Dallaire was tasked with doing something about it without being given any of the things like authority and manpower that he needed. Dallaire himself is quite a likable person, and you can't help feeling his frustration and horror at what was happening around him and his inability to do anything real about it. It eventually led to his breakdown and he is still not completely recovered, but it was heartening to see the reception he received in Rwanda, where the people there were clearly aware of how much he was actually able to do, despite him personally discounting them compared to what he felt he was required to do. Kate and I had seen Hotel Rwanda and so we were very interested to see something more factual. Hotel Rwanda itself was a very good film, and did give you a sense of the atrocity that was going on, but at the end of the day it was a fictional piece, based on reality, whereas this film was a documentary of Dallaire's return to the country on the 10th anniversary of the genocide.
Needless to say it wasn't a "fun" movie, but it was very moving, and made me get a little angry at myself for not really paying enough attention to what was going on at the time. I guess this sort of thing happens a lot, but that doesn't make it right.
Anyway, I think it's an important movie, and it helped to improve the characterisation of Dallaire after Nick Nolte's version of him in Hotel Rwanda, although that wasn't too far from the truth, it didn't do the man justice I think.