I'm a uni student and somehow stumbled across the Rwandan Genocide when trawling around Wikipedia one evening, and I was compelled to find out more. I was only 5 when it happened, so I didn't know anything about it until I began reading about it. After watching Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs, I can honestly say this film is effortlessly better than either (although both Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs are very, very good films). The film isn't injected with Hollywood make believe or told from the point of view of people who are not in actual peril themselves, nor does it portray the horrors in an impersonal yet graphic way. It follows the story of one moderate Hutu soldier who is married to a Tutsi, and how his life unravels completely when the genocide happens. The realism in the man's struggle is what makes this film so compelling, because the situations he is faced with are not Hollywood 'near-misses' or 'it goes bad, but then it turns out good', when things go wrong, they really go wrong and many times you feel your heart break for him and the supporting cast. It shows things in more detail than other films, and doesn't try to elicit emotions from you with certain camera tricks or narrative segments, it simply lets the situations unfold and lets you be a spectator, and this cold, unrelenting presentation of the events is what makes it so gripping.