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 Rwanda genocide film revives painful memories for survivors
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Rwanda genocide film revives painful memories for survivors
Mon Mar 27, 2006 3:40 PM GMT
By Arthur Asiimwe
KIGALI (Reuters) - A new film about the 1994 Rwandan genocide was being premiered in Kigali on Monday amid fears it was stirring up painful memories for survivors weeks ahead of the 12th anniversary of the massacre.
Michael Caton-Jones, director of "Shooting Dogs", said his film, which criticises the failure of western powers to intervene and halt the killings, was meant to give western audiences a better understanding of what happened.
"The film was intended to raise questions," he told Reuters before its premiere in Kigali's Amahoro stadium where hundreds sought refugee during the massacre.
The film, starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy, tells the story of a Catholic priest and a teacher caught up in the genocide in which extremists from the Hutu majority shot, hacked and beat to death 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.
But a Rwandan genocide survivor group said the film had re-traumatised survivors who were involved as extras.
"The movie regenerates the memory because of the degree of slaughter portrayed," Wilson Gabo, a co-ordinator for Survivors' Fund for Rwanda, told Reuters.
"It has caused trauma to many of the survivors who took part in the shooting, including school-going children."
Gabo said three schools were forced to close down and many student survivors with roles in the movie were still scarred by the experience with some refusing to go back to class.
Actor Dancy defended the film.
"I hope the survivors see it as an honest and a serious attempt to understand what happened and not to try to make an entertaining film about something horrible," he told Reuters.
"If you're going to address that period of history, then there'll be moments that are terrible because that is the truth."
"Shooting Dogs" refers to the UN troops' habit of firing at dogs eating corpses that littered the streets of Kigali during the 100 days of slaughter.
The film, one of the few to be shot in Rwanda, depicts the massacre at the Ecole Technique Officielle in Kigali where at least 2,500 Tutsi men, women and children took refuge during the initial days of the genocide.
The school was under the protection of the United Nations peacekeeping force until it pulled out during the first weeks of April 1994, taking white Europeans along with them.
Within hours after they left, most of the refugees had been slaughtered by Hutu militias known as Interahamwe.
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