There are several overlaps in tone, story and emotion and some key differences between Shooting Dogs (2005) and Hotel Rwanda (2004).
Shooting Dogs was shot in Rwanda, using locals - some of them genocide survivors - for its extras and in its production crew (Hotel Rwanda was shot in South Africa). The most moving moment comes in the credits, where production crew members smile at the camera as we read how they survived the genocide in 1994.
Secondly, where Hotel Rwanda tells the story from the point of view of the Rwandans, Shooting Dogs is seen through impotent and outraged Western eyes, and thus focuses on Western white guilt and indifference.
Curiously, there's no mention of the fact that the Hutu/Tutsi distinction is itself unclear. It may be that the only difference between the two groups is economic. Certainly, a racial basis for the difference is arguable, and was historically promoted by European colonisers (see Tutsi origins, Hamitic theory, Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families or Lindqvist's 'Exterminate All The Brutes' for more on colonialism and genocide in Africa).
And the films themselves have been controversial: Hotel Rwanda was criticised for shooting on location in South Africa rather than Rwanda, and Shooting Dogs was accused of traumatising survivors, and Linda Melvern concluded This film is fiction ("the BBC has spent money on a fictional account of genocide, a film that takes our knowledge of this terrible crime no further forward at all").
It provides a more direct wrench than Hotel Rwanda, even though the nobility of the characters becomes stifling, as Variety put it. Nonetheless, a heartfelt, moving film.
Further reading:
- Walking with ghosts - David Belton, co-writer and producer of Shooting Dogs, recalls a meeting with a Tutsi friend who - like many of those who survived - still confronts daily the memories of his harrowing ordeal.
- Gil Courtemanche's Sunday at the pool in Kigali (2003) and Romeo Dallaire's Shaking Hands With The Devil (2003) (and here's Courtemanche reviewing Dallaire's book).
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