Shooting Dogs

A film set in Rwanda. The year is 1994. There is a school in Kigali. The school belongs to a Belgian church. Christopher is the priest there and has lived there for years. Joe is a young English teacher. He has come for a year. A United Nations detachment is stationed at the school. Belgian soldiers. One night the president's aircraft is shot down. The next morning everything begins. People take shelter at the school. The number grows fast; two thousand, then more. There is a militia at the gate. They have machetes and they wait. The soldiers are inside. They have no mandate; they cannot fire and can only observe. From there the film is a story of waiting. The water runs out, the food runs out, and outside they wait. There are dogs as well. They are eating the bodies and are the only thing the soldiers are permitted to shoot. The film's title comes from that. What the narrative is interested in is not massacre but orders: its idea is that an armed and trained force stood there and did nothing, and that this was a matter of instruction rather than personal cowardice. Then a decision comes. The detachment will withdraw. The soldiers will take only the foreigners. The lorries come. The white people board. That scene is the centre and the narrative softens nothing. Christopher chooses to stay. Joe goes. The narrative does not condemn Joe but opens an account; there is a frame reaching years later. It was filmed in Rwanda, in the places where the events happened. Many survivors of the genocide worked on the crew and some appear in it. The production was tied to a not-for-profit structure. The same events had been told in another film; this production is smaller and harder. Michael Caton-Jones directed. John Hurt, Hugh Dancy, Dominique Horwitz and Claire-Hope Ashitey are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of the genocide and the question of international responsibility. Who it is not for: anyone with low tolerance; the narrative does not avoid showing the violence and its ending is wholly dark.