The award-winning director Terry George’s new film, “Hotel Rwanda,” tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the general manager of a Kigali hotel who stood up to wave after wave of would-be killers during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Using a combination of savvy, scotch, beer, and food, Mr. Rusesabagina bribed the militia intent on killing Tutsi so that he could turn a four-star Belgian run hotel into an oasis of refuge.

“‘Never again’ are the two most abused words in the English language,” Mr. George told a small audience last week as he introduced his film during a preview in New York. “Instead, what we see is ‘again and again,’ in Rwanda, in Darfur, we aren’t learning any lessons. I wanted to make a film that would explain what is going on in Africa.”

Indeed, the ethnic cleansing and genocide going on right now in the western Sudanese province of Darfur seem to have taken a page out of the Rwandan playbook. The government in Khartoum has sent rebel Arabs on horseback, known as the janjaweed, into villages in Darfur to drive black Africans out of the region. Tens of thousands have been killed. At least 1 million have escaped to Chad or to refugee camps inside Sudan. And while the world has wrung its hands about this for some time, the ethnic cleansing and genocide have continued unabated.

The story of Mr. Rusesabagina, portrayed in the film by Don Cheadle, is a legend in Rwanda. Locals take visitors on tours of Hotel des Mille Collines, pointing out areas where the minority Tutsi hid from Hutu soldiers. They tell stories of the army trying to starve out refugees. At one point, soldiers cut off water and electricity to the hotel. The pool was drained to give them water to drink. All this is shown in the film.

Hotel des Mille Collines was so renowned during the killing that even today many aid workers politely decline to dine there. It brings back too many memories of hallways full of refugees, children wounded by machetes, and of a time when chaos reigned.

Having just spent the last two years writing a book about the press’s role in stoking the 1994 genocide, my expectations for a Hollywood film on the events were low. The politics of Rwanda are complicated and difficult to explain. The reasons for the genocide are equally complex. It isn’t the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster. (That is part of the reason why it took Mr. George five years to make the film.) But the movie defies low expectations. It is an accurate primer on what happened, and a dramatic love story as well.

It is commonly believed that Rwanda’s genocide was a tribal conflict that got out of hand. In fact, work at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and other courts has proven that cynical politicians manipulated the Tutsi to rally the Hutu majority to a cause and keep the reins on power. “Hotel Rwanda” manages to chew its way through all these issues and portrays Mr. Rusesabagina as Rwanda’s Schindler. While he didn’t have a list, he did manage to get 1,200 Rwandans out of the hotel and onto buses bound for Tanzania. The film shows how it all unfolded.

Radio Telelvision Libre des Mille Collines, or RTLM, the radio station that fanned the genocide by telling Rwandans to “go do their work” and broadcast where they could find Tutsi sympathizers, also has a large role in the film. Up until now, those who heard of Radio Hate might have a vague recollection that it poured gas on the already flaming violence. “Hotel Rwanda” shows just how much. There is scene after scene of hotel workers or Interahamwe militia listening to the radio for instruction. Mr. Rusesabagina follows the fate of a convoy of refugees by tuning into RTLM.

The world’s decision to turn a blind eye to what was unfolding in Rwanda is one of the main themes of Mr. George’s film. Mr. Rusesabagina, a mild-mannered and intensely polite Hutu hotel manager, becomes an unlikely hero.

Mr. Rusesabagina used his position at the hotel to curry favor with Rwanda’s Hutu leaders in case he would need to call upon them for favor. While he initially had the salvation of his family in mind, the project became much bigger when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot out of the sky in April 1994 and the genocide began. More than 800,000 minority Tutsi and moderate Hutu were massacred by marauding bands of Hutu extremists in the space of 100 days. That makes Rwanda’s killing machine the most efficient in history. The United Nations did little to help, and with the violence spreading just six months after American helicopters went down in Mogadishu, Somalia, American forces didn’t want to get involved. All these issues are tackled to perfection in the film.

The film opens to general audiences on December 22.