by MARK SLUTSKY

A dozen years after the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s, a period in which nearly a million people were horrifically murdered by their neighbours and countrymen while the world did pretty much nothing about it, filmmakers seem like they’ve become comfortable with the idea of dealing with the subject cinematically. 2004 saw the multiple-Oscar-winning Hotel Rwanda. Shake Hands With the Devil, based on the book by Romeo Dallaire, is expected next year. And this week sees the release of director Michael Caton-Jones’s Rwandan-shot Shooting Dogs.

Based on the massacre of 2,500 Rwandans (mostly belonging to the Tutsi ethnic minority, approximately 75 per cent of whose total population were estimated to have been killed in 1994) at a technical school formerly guarded by UN peacekeepers, Shooting Dogs stars John Hurt and Hugh Dancy as two Brits who watch helplessly as the crisis unfolds around them. Hurt is a Catholic priest who’s been ministering to the faithful in Rwanda for 30 years, and Dancy is a young, idealistic teacher. Dominique Horwitz plays Belgian Charles Delon, a UN peacekeeping officer stationed at the school with his troops.

As the crisis unfolds, the UN soldiers, who have a mandate only to observe, not intervene, do nothing as Tutsis and moderate Hutus are slaughtered all around them.

It’s an unspeakable situation that the film dramatizes ably and chillingly. It’s horrible. But there’s something disingenuous about Shooting Dogs. Hundreds of thousands of Africans died in the genocide, but the movie is ultimately not about them, but about awesome white people who felt really bad about it. Certainly there were Europeans in Rwanda who did all they could and who tried to mobilize the UN and their own countries, but the fact that the majority of the Western world did nothing makes the film’s focus even more galling and transparently born of guilt.

As the credits roll, you see photos of various crew and cast members with a brief description of how they were affected by the conflict; almost all have harrowing stories of loss and survival, each of which would have been a far worthier subject than the film’s fictional, heroic Europeans.

Shooting Dogs opens Friday, July 28

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