During classes on the Holocaust, a required element in secondary-level history, UK teachers have found that students repeatedly claim that such events could never happen today (Levenson 2009). So some teachers have proposed that the Rwandan genocide should be included in the national curriculum, inspired by Hotel Rwanda (2004). This film marked the first time many audiences heard about the Rwandan genocide, affirming the extent to which people without direct connection to particular historical events find out about them from the movies. This chapter explores fictional films about the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide – mainly historical dramas, which aspire to be pedagogical vehicles, providing ‘lessons’ about the past. What do they teach us about genocide and how do they avoid comforting illusions that it belongs to the past or begins and ends with the Nazis?

As this chapter argues, using Schindler's List (1993) as its archetypal example, historical dramas tend to be moralistic, offering up tales of good versus evil that foster identification with heroic ‘good men’, who act as we would wish to act in similar circumstances, or with innocent bystanders, both of which relieve viewers of their own responsibility while reassuring them about their moral place in the world, either as individuals or nations. Critics have objected to the way such movies come to define what audiences know and understand about those events, highlighting cinema's potential to ‘rewrite’ history in ways that erase its troubling aspects; such distorted knowledge, it is often argued, is hardly better than no knowledge at all. Yet while illuminating some of those tendencies, academic criticism itself has a moralistic tenor, as testified by views on mainstream Holocaust films, which are criticised for trivialising that catastrophe and attacked for their ‘inappropriate comparison with other events’ and for denying its ‘true horror’ (Weissman 2004: 12). Discussion tends to revolve around taboos and limits, ‘drawing a line’ at certain kinds of representations, such as extermination in the gas chambers.

Such moralism, both of the movies and the critics, tends to present perpetrators as ‘evil’ Others, utterly unlike ‘us’, the viewers, which can stand in the way of an ethical reflection on the atrocity-producing situation.