Buy the DVD

Shooting Dogs
Michael Caton-Jones

Chris Wilkinson
posted 12 July 2006

It is often said in Rwanda that the country has such natural beauty it is the one place on earth that God returns to each night to sleep. Since the genocide of April 1994 this belief has taken on a cruel irony. As 800 000 Tutsis and Moderate Hutus were torn apart by a hundred thousand machetes, the UN and the world's most powerful governments turned their backs. There was clear evidence that this slaughter was entirely planned and premeditated. Yet it seems that despite this, everyone, from the international community to God, was intent on keeping their eyes firmly shut.

Shooting Dogs, released this month on DVD, is one of a spate of recent fictional attempts to confront what happened. It follows other films like Hotel Rwanda and Raul Peck's Sometimes in April and plays like JT Rogers' The Overwhelming currently running at the National Theatre in London. The film tells the true story of one particular massacre that occurred at one school - the Ecole Technique Officialle. Protected only by the presence of a small UN contingent, and looking to a Catholic priest, Father Christopher (John Hurt), for help, 2500 Tutsi refugees have no choice but to sit and wait to be massacred.

The film mixes a sense of intense anger with profound despair. As militiamen gather outside the school, chanting and waving machetes, Father Christopher repeatedly asks the UN commander why he won't do anything. It is a futile question, all the commander can say is that he has no mandate to act. He is there only to 'monitor the peace, not to enforce it'. He argues that only the UN Security Council itself could change that. Towards the end of the film, director Michael Caton-Walsh points an accusatory finger straight at the American government. Intercut with images of hundreds of dead people, we see genuine documentary footage of Christine Shelley, a spokesperson for the US State Department explaining why they are doing nothing to stop it. She engages in some desperate semantic wrangling, trying to distinguish between mere 'acts of genocide' and 'genocide' itself, in an attempt to evade the US' legal obligation to act.

At the time, the event itself was cloaked by a lethal quilt of these euphemisms, metaphors and lies. However, the use of this real footage is just one example of how the film's makers are now trying to unweave this, and expose the truth which lies beneath. In the opening sequence of the film we are told that it 'is based on real events and shot at the locations depicted'. At the end, the credits are interwoven with pictures of some of the Rwandan members of the cast and crew who survived the genocide and with details of how many of their family members died. It is as if fiction is simply not capable of communicating the enormity of what actually happened, and so reality has to continuously crash through.

However, the film does more than simply wag its finger at the powerful. One of the most striking elements running through it is its attitude towards religious faith. As UN troops prepare to withdraw, and the militias close in, the young English gap year student Joe (Hugh Dancy) asks Father Christopher what they are going to do. His solution? To hold mass. Initially, it seems like a breathtakingly inadequate response. What room is there for God in this place full of the soon to be dead? But as he leads them in singing and prayer, we get a sense of the absurd but very real value of this ritual. When there is no hope, and no escape, it provides the last moment of beauty and community that those people would ever have. As he surveys the massed humanity around him, Father Christopher says to Joe that he knows where God is. He has not abandoned them, rather: 'he's right here, with these people, suffering'. And it is this belief that makes him choose not to abandon the people that he has committed himself to either.

It is virtually impossible to find any sense of hope in what happened in Rwanda twelve years ago. And this film is sensible not to try. The few who survived are outweighed by the hundreds of thousands who died, and any simple celebration of the living risks forgetting the dead. However, by focussing on the traces of humanity which stubbornly remained despite the avalanche of violence, the film is able to show both what people can be, and also what they so often aren't.