Huddled in a draughty football stadium, about 2 000 Rwandans braved hours of torrential rain to watch the screening of the latest movie on their country’s 1994 genocide, Shooting Dogs.
Survivors were in the audience at the film’s Rwanda premiere, braving their own memories more than a decade after hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in a 100-day bloodbath fuelled by ethnic hatred.
Based on a true story, the film is set during the first week of the genocide in a school in the capital. It recounts how United Nations peacekeeping forces left thousands of Rwandans in the hands of their executioners by pulling out of the school where they had sought refuge.
”I wanted to see the film. My relatives were at that school, my aunt and my cousins. I wasn’t there,” said 35-year-old Olivier, choking back emotion as he left the screening on Monday.
The title is an ironic reference to the readiness of UN peacekeepers to shoot dogs that were feasting on corpses and their reluctance to shoot the marauding militiamen who perpetrated the carnage, which ultimately claimed 800 000 lives.
”We got somewhere close to 2 000 people coming to see the film in the worst possible weather, some of the worst weather I have ever seen in this country,” said the film’s producer David Belton, who was in Rwanda in 1994 as a journalist covering the genocide for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The film stars John Hurt as a priest and Hugh Dancy as a young English teacher. Together the two men have to confront the limits of their courage as they choose whether to leave or to stay.
Both actors along with director Michael Caton-Jones and members of the Rwandan government were in the stadium for Monday’s screening.
At one point, high winds threatened to blow away the giant inflatable screen upon which the film was projected, nearly drowning out the sound system.
When the lights came on at the end, many in the audience were wiping their eyes and sniffing. Others were speechless with emotion.
The film, which contains scenes of violence, did not trigger the mass hysteria that organisers had feared when they increased the number of trauma councillors and medical personnel on hand in the stadium.
But it clearly left its mark. Some women clasped the hands of strangers while others laughed nervously.
”It’s very, very moving, said Elise (28) who works as a translator, before expressing her scorn at the international community for ”abandoning” Rwanda.
”This should open their eyes for them,” she said.
One woman walked out after a first violent roadblock scene, saying she couldn’t take any more. Others stayed away altogether, fearing that scenes of slaughter on a giant screen would be too much for them.
”My wife saw the film at a private screening and decided she couldn’t cope with seeing it a second time,” said one genocide survivor visibly shaken despite having worked on the film.
The film, shot in eight weeks in Rwanda, featured many Rwandans, including survivors of the 1994 carnage in which mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred, many hacked and bludgeoned to death with machetes and spiked clubs.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame dismissed allegations that the film had revived the trauma among some survivors, in talks on Tuesday with the director and two actors.
”I think it is not the film that traumatises,” he said at the meeting in which journalists were also present. ”It is what happens to them [the survivors] that traumatises. Even without the film people are traumatised.”
Kagame insisted the movie, which follows the award-winning film Hotel Rwanda, another true story of a hotel manager who sheltered Tutsi refugees from Hutu gangs, would become part of Rwanda’s memory of the genocide.
”Some people would want us to switch off and forget what happened, but me I see it differently.
”The most painful part of our history is part of us and we need to accept it and deal with it,” the president said.
Shooting Dogs, which opened earlier this month in France, has its British premier on Thursday and will open to audiences there nationwide on Friday. – Sapa-AFP