Sometimes in April

Sometimes in April (2005) is a Franco-American-Rwandan historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Raoul Peck filmed on location in Rwanda, with many survivors in the cast, for HBO — released a year after Hotel Rwanda, and deliberately taking a different approach to the same hundred days.

Rwandan Army officer Augustin Muganza (Idris Elba) and his brother, a radio broadcaster, stand on opposite sides of the same catastrophe: Augustin is trying to move his Tutsi wife and children to safety while his brother's voice goes out over the airwaves calling the Tutsi population "cockroaches." Between April and July 1994, roughly eight hundred thousand people were killed. Peck renders that number human by tracking a single family undone not by distant forces but by neighbours and relatives. A parallel timeline set in 2004 follows Augustin as he testifies before an international tribunal, with Debra Winger and Noah Emmerich as UN personnel who had a mandate but no orders to intervene.

This is a film that refuses to look away. Watch Sometimes in April (2005) online on iFILM.