I have just watched this film on DVD (it was a bit of a scandal that in the UK it was shown in very few cinemas and for a short period) and read the user comments so won't repeat points already made. I have a personal interest as I witnessed the aftermath of another Hutu on Tutsi massacre some hours after it happened in Burundi just over ten years after the events of 1994. The film is excellently and movingly made. Certainly it was better than Hotel Rwanda which would have been improved if made on location in Rwanda like Shooting Dogs instead of South Africa. Unlike the users comments, the film DOES not make too much heavy weather of blaming the UN. Do your users want troops under UN command NOT to follow their UN mandate and act on their own volition? What would people's reactions have been if the UN troops had opened fire on the Hutus? White troops from the former colonizing country, Belgium, using high powered assault rifles on black people with machetes? And the film made a very incisive point through the words of the hard-bitten BBC woman reporter who admitted she wasn't moved to tears when she saw murdered Rwandan women, unlike in Bosnia 'where she could have been my mother' but here 'she was just another dead African'. Somehow I don't think a US-made film could have been so honest - ie not hypocritical - about white people's reactions to dead Africans. Nor does it over-demonise the Hutus - there have been cases of Tutsis massacring Hutus, after all. I think in the end this is a moving homage, if a little late, to a people that almost disappeared from the face of the earth. The end credits showing laughing, happy Rwandan members of the crew who had suffered terrible horrors and family losses are a tribute to the human spirit, particularly the spirit of Africans who suffer so much, and should make us be more grateful than we are for having been born in countries where these things don't happen...I don't say can't happen because as we know it happened in Europe in former Yugoslavia not so long ago.
Review of Shooting Dogs
