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Shooting Dogs [2006]


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Life-changing and heartbreaking
Review date: 2008-11-26 Rating: 8 out of 10

It's very rare that a film based on such a bleak event, the Tutsi massacre, managed to combine both a harrowing and at times distubing account of life under this terror, with a priceless comical edge that left you at times in stitches.

This film beautifully combines terror and dark humour, making it a must watch. However, this is my least favourite satirical war film to date, as it was in parts too serious!

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Reviews


Involving Account Of A Fearful Tragedy
Review date: 2008-02-04 Rating: 8 out of 10

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
Review date: 2007-11-17 Rating: 10 out of 10

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
Review date: 2007-06-23 Rating: 10 out of 10

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.









Heartbreaking
Review date: 2007-02-14 Rating: 10 out of 10

A very powerful film which will move you . Extemely well acted with a heart breaking story. One of those films that you finish watching, and think yourself lucky for what you have in life.

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Louis Mahoney
Dominique Horwitz
John Hurt
Hugh Dancy
Nicola Walker

Creators:
John Hurt (Primary Contributor)
Hugh Dancy (Primary Contributor)
Andrew Wood (Producer)
David Belton (Producer)
David Belton (Writer)
David M. Thompson (Producer)
Jens Meurer (Producer)
David Wolstencroft (Writer)
Richard Alwyn (Writer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Metrodome Distribution Ltd
Manufacturer: Metrodome Distribution Ltd
EAN: 5055002552564
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL,
Release date: 2006-07-31
Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 110 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2005
Language: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: French (Original Language)

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