Word: frenched
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...took in $870,000 on just 43 screens. But the big race, not so much at the box office as in this week's Oscar pools, was between two nominees for the foreign-language Academy Award, both of them released by Sony Pictures Classics. A Prophet, Jacques Audiard's French prison drama, opened to a decent $170,000 in nine theaters in New York and Los Angeles, while Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon made $168,000 in its ninth week of limited release. That movie has now passed $1.5 million in North America - not bad for a powerful...
...genocide in Rwanda claimed more than 800,000 lives, sparked years of violent unrest in central Africa and poisoned French-Rwandan relations so severely that Kigali, the Rwandan capital, suspended diplomatic ties with Paris in 2006 and replaced French with English in Rwandan schools. So when French President Nicolas Sarkozy came into power in 2007, he made repairing relations with Rwanda - and clearing up the lingering suspicions and accusations surrounding the genocide - a major foreign-policy priority. During his visit to Rwanda this week, he appeared to turn a page in the countries' relations by acknowledging that France had committed...
First, it showed just how far Sarkozy was prepared to go to "construct a new relation of confidence" with Rwanda by breaking with France's past position of irreproachability in the slaughter. Until now, the official French line has been that Paris reacted quickly to the crisis by leading a U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping mission called Operation Turquoise to halt the killings. France has also flatly refuted claims by Tutsi militia leaders who took power in Rwanda after the genocide - and still form the basis of the Rwandan government - that French forces serving as advisers in the country in the early...
France's change of position is also an indication of how important Sarkozy views Rwanda in his efforts to radically revise French strategy toward Africa. For the past 40 years, Paris has dealt with its former African colonies under an interventionist policy called Françafrique, under which France propped up client regimes in Africa in order to maintain its political and business interests on the continent. Now Sarkozy is looking to loosen France's heavy political and military commitments in Africa and pass the responsibilities of maintaining security to a group of stable and reliable partners in the region...
Still, it won't bury another bone of contention: the arrest warrants that have been issued by a French investigating judge for several members of former Tutsi militias who now sit in Rwanda's government. The men are suspected of having shot down the plane of the nation's President, a Hutu, in 1994 - an attack that sparked the genocide, which, in turn, allowed the Tutsis to reclaim power. The judge's inquiry, which seeks to determine if the Tutsi militias could have engineered the massacre of their own people in a Machiavellian scheme to take control, is what prompted...