I watch upwards of 300 movies a year and use IMDb like a fiend, but only this movie has ever compelled me to register and comment. "Shooting Dogs" is a BBC Films/UK Film Council film about the genocide in Rwanda that was ignored whilst the international community pontificated about the language used to describe what was going on (i.e. "Acts of genocide" vs "genocide"). The film focuses on the desperate plight of 2500 Tutsis seeking shelter in a school-cum-UN military compound. It goes some way to explain the history of the situation and the events surrcounding the genocide.
What makes this movie special is that a number of the production crew are survivors of the Rwandan crisis, and are telling their own stories. As macho as i would love to sound, i had tears in my eyes and felt the pain, hopelessness and indignation - and those are things that no director can claim to have brought to life for me in anything i've watched until now (the closest was probably the magnificent "Mysterious Skin"). Nothing is held back, and not should it be. The horror here is not graphic close-ups, but the shocking disregard for life that leads to the slaughter of newborn babies with machetes, the abject impotence of the UN and how tribal loyalties can turn the closest of friends into murderers.
For those who have lived in Africa (as i have), what is portrayed here is all too real. Like is said by one BBC reporter in the movie, in the Balkans the people were white and they could have been your own mother, but in Rwanda its worse than numbness - its just another dead African. Ignore your preconceptions, assumptions and instant reaction to skip to the next title because its not familiar, it wasn't in the cinema and Hotel Rwanda didn't appeal to you much. The impact this movie had on me was that profound, and i'd urge anyone to watch it to understand what happened there.
And when the credits come up and you've had time to think it over and resolve that it should never happen again, i'd say one word to you: Darfur. It just happened again only recently.
