Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3005 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-07-31
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

DVD Description
Joe Connor (Hugh Dancy) is teaching in Rwanda during his gap year. When the school he teaches at becomes a haven for thousands of Rwandans fleeing the genocide, Joe promises his brightest pupil, Marie (Clare-Hope Ashitey), that the UN soldiers will protect her from the hordes of extremist militia baying for blood outside the school. But when the UN abandon the refugees, Joe and the school's headmaster, Father Christopher (John Hurt), face an agonising dilemma: should they leave or should they stand firm with the Rwandans. As the UN trucks force their way through the terrified refugees, Joe stares at the tear-stained face of Marie: what should he do?

Based on real events and filmed at the actual location where this story took place, SHOOTING DOGS is an emotionally gripping, authentic and powerful recreation of a tragic real life story that took place during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Synopsis
An English priest working at a school in Rwanda in 1994 is drawn up in the violence caused when tension between Tutsi and Hutu tribes escalates into genocide. Based on a story co-written by BBC journalist David Belton--who was working in the country at the time of the genocide--SHOOTING DOGS is an intense and powerful fictionalised account of events that took place at the Ecole Technique Officielle school in Kigali between April 6th and April 11th in 1994. The film shows the experiences of the world-weary school headmaster Father Christopher (John Hurt) and Joe Connor (Hugh Dancy), a charismatic and idealistic young man taking a year out teaching in Africa. When the genocide begins to erupt, the school becomes a refuge for Europeans and Tutsis. A contingent of Belgian UN soldiers is stationed at the school but as the Hutu government vows to eliminate all Tutsis, the refugees wonder if the UN will protect them from the machete-wielding Hutu militias who start to surround the school. In order to give the film a realistic look, director Michael Canton-Jones elicits naturalistic performances from the actors, some of whom are survivors of the genocide. The film was shot largely with handheld cameras in order to give a documentary feel to the story and SHOOTING DOGS was filmed at the school caught up in the genocide. John Hurt and Hugh Dancy give strong, emotional performances as characters caught up in a series of moral dilemmas as to how they can help the Tutsis. By focusing on the fate of one school, this accomplished film succeeds in giving an overview of the Rwandan conflict and the inertia of various governments and organisations in dealing with the violence.

Andy Jacobs - BBC
John Hurts character is the heart and soul of an unusually thoughtful film.

Customer Reviews

Involving Account Of A Fearful Tragedy
This is a very very powerful film, apparently based on actual events; Some of those who lived through the events in Rwanda took part in the film as extras or technicians (I prefer not to use the term "survivor", which has been cheapened by its use to describe Jews who moved comfortably from Germany to the UK or USA in the 1930's and thus "survived" the "holocaust" in Hampstead or Brooklyn).

John Hurt plays, memorably, a priest who is also the director of a Catholic school in Rwanda. When the Hutu majority (who exercise political power) start to hack to death with pangas the generally more cultured Tutsi minority, he elects to stay with the school, its compound now packed with refugees. The UN force in the school is ordered to leave and take all Europeans. They exit...Hurt's young English assistant, terrified, abandons the doomed Tutsis, including a teenage girl athlete who had had a crush on him. Hurt tries to break out with some children hidden in his van...at a roadblock the children and the athletic girl wriggle away and survive, while Hurt's priest, a martyr and near-as-anything saint, is shot dead at point blank range by a young man he has known and taught. The film ends with the athletic girl meeting the young Englishman in the UK. He must live with his cowardice, understandable though it was (he could not have saved anyone and would certainly have been killed himself had he stayed: life is always complex).

The film reminded me of when I represented, as Counsel, a Tutsi at London Heathrow Airport, at the Immigration Tribunal, in, I think 1994. He claimed to seek asylum; the Home Office said there was no risk to Tutsis. I got the matter adjourned on a technicality to save him from being deported. A week later, the killings started in earnest. It is said that a great number, perhaps 800,000, Tutsis were killed.

This is an emotionally involving film which shows the tragedy which is so much of black Africa decades after the departure of the European colonial administrators and rulers. I watched this film with my wife, who was born in East Africa and spent her first 14 years there. She recalls Rwanda as totally different then, in the 1950's, far more green and pleasant.

Truly chilling
I watched Hotel Rwanda last year and rated it as one of the most frightening films I have ever seen. Since then, i have read several books on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 including the EXCELLENT Shake Hands with the Devil which I am convincing all of my friends to read. Shooting Dogs pulled no punches, the scenes of the hutus dancing and singing whilst waving their weapons at the road blocks and around the school are truly chilling.

A touching story of Rwanda 1994
Hotel Rwanda was a good film. It opened a grim reality to wide audience, waking people up to the shameful behaviour of the rest of the world in the mid 1990s. But in making the film appeal to the mass market, there was some caricaturing of individuals, some mushing of multiple personalities into single roles which flattened some of the characters and as a result, you didn't feel like you were there. You felt touched...but lightly.

Shooting Dogs is fundamentally the same story. It's about not being able to help everyone; of choosing the lesser of two evils; and the challenges of watching humanity ripped apart. It's about being a stranger where one has felt welcome; and about the sheer fear and fatalism that comes from having ones security withdrawn.

But it takes a very different approach to Hotel Rwanda, focusing on a single incident at a school compound and on a handful of key personalities rather than telling the story of the genocide at a national level through the acts of one man. That said...it's not a claustrophobic film to watch in any way as there is a lot of crowd action.

It's far easier to be sucked into the film and it is very moving. The images are less confronting but the story and the outcomes far more so. One leaves the film not able to remember any key scenes, or recite any of the lines, but a bit shellshocked and thinking that it's an amazing film.

Despite being more forgettable, the film is somehow more tangible - the fear more intense but easier to empathise with (perhaps because it's ramped up more slowly).

The acting is excellent, the dynamic between Dancy and Hurd almost familial and it's a film that works and a strong story.

I personally preferred this to Hotel Rwanda even if it was not as gripping. If you're the kind of person that likes to leave a film touched rather than impressed, this may be a film for you.