While television news and early documentaries laid the groundwork for the memorialization of the Rwandan genocide, quintessential films like Hotel Rwanda, Ghosts of Rwanda, and Shake Hands with the Devil most certainly transformed those often-dissented histories and created what could be labeled as an official historical media memory of the genocide with global reach. As we shall see, this official historical media memory was often maintained in the subsequent production of films and documentaries on the Rwandan genocide. However, the ten-year commemoration of the genocide against Tutsi marked a surge in the production of films that has continued to this day, significantly with peaks in connection to the fifteenth and twentieth commemorations in 2009 and 2014, when eighteen and twenty-nine films were released respectively. Altogether, another 150 films have been produced in the wake of the surge in 2004. This vast global production has not only maintained the official historical media memory but also—almost unavoidably due to the diverse nature of film and television and the creating process involved in cinematic history—extended, developed, and even revised the historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide.

The purpose of this third part is to create an overview of the films that have maintained the official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide while, at the same time, acknowledge, contextualize, and explicate the competing historical memories that likewise have emerged within this substantial production of cinematic history. This part of the book is therefore divided into five chapters. The first two chapters will commence with a discussion of the international production of feature films and documentary films, respectively, on the Rwandan genocide, partly because the feature film and the documentary film potentially have the opportunity to spread globally, and partly because the majority of these films tends to uphold the official historical media memory. These two chapters are then followed by three chapters concentrating on three specific themes that have crystallized out of the large body of films in comparison to the official historical media memory, namely women, reconciliation, and revision.