Customer Reviews
Involving Account Of A Fearful Tragedy - By: ianrmillard, 04 Feb 2008 
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 & 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 generallly 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 & take alll 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 & the athletic girl wriggle away & survive, while Hurt's priest, a martyr & near-as-anything saint, is shot dead at point blank range by a young man he has known & 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 & 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 emotionallly involving film which shows the tragedy which is so much of black Africa decades after the departure of the European colonial administrators & rulers. I watched this film with my wife, who was born in East Africa & spent her first 14 years there. She recallls Rwanda as totallly different then, in the 1950's, far more green & pleasant.
Truly chilling - By: S. Smith, 17 Nov 2007 
I watched Hotel Rwanda last year & 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 alll of my friends to read. Shooting Dogs pulled no punches, the scenes of the hutus dancing & singing whilst waving their weapons at the road blocks & around the school are truly chilling.
A touching story of Rwanda 1994 - By: Seb M, 23 Jun 2007 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 & as a result, you didn't feel like you were there. You felt touched...but lightly.
Shooting Dogs is fundamentallly the same story. It's about not being able to help everyone; of choosing the lesser of two evils; & the challlenges of watching humanity ripped apart. It's about being a stranger where one has felt welcome; & about the sheer fear & 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 & 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 & it is very moving. The images are less confronting but the story & 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 & 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 & Hurd almost familial & it's a film that works & a strong story.
I personallly 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 - By: Mark Russell, 14 Feb 2007 A very powerful film which will move you . Extemely well acted with a heart breaking story. One of those films that you finish watching, & think yourself lucky for what you have in life.
a realistic account, very powerful, very courageous - By: Joelle Havelaar, 10 Feb 2007 The beauty of this movie is in its simplicity. initiallly I found it a bit slow, & disconnected, but it alll comes together in the end. The characteres are life-like & not exagerated, unlike what you find in a lot of Hollywood movies. Their emotions, their dilemas, their decisions are very real. No-one is portrayed as evil, or overly good, they are just decent human beings, doing what they can. For example it would have been easy to portray the belgian officer in charge of the UN forces at the school, as a baddy. But instead, we can see what it must have been like for him too, & the constraints that he has to work with. The title of the movie comes clear as an expression of how powerless the UN troops were, because of the lack of political backing. They can only shoot at the dogs.
This movie tries to help you understand how such horrors can actuallly happen. It shows one of the Hutus charactere, who also seems like a decent guy, getting sucked into the madness.
There are no heros in this movie, in the hollywood sense. Just ordinary good people trying to do what they think is right. This movie is very humble in the sense that it's telling a true story with no attempt to make it anything else than what it was. It reallly makes you think.
