Helping Rwanda to Weep

There is rarely anything resembling a “full recovery” for genocide survivors. Visions of people slaughtered by machete, their bodies left strewn over church pews, don’t just disappear. Such bloodshed stains people—and nations—for lifetimes.

So it goes in Rwanda, a country where 12 years ago remarkably well-organized Hutu extremist militias systematically murdered hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Tens of thousands of people—stirred on by virulent state radio broadcasts, profound economic resentments and plenty of alcohol—eliminated "cockroaches,” who had once been compatriots, friends or even family. Fearful of becoming embroiled in an African quagmire that might risk Western lives, the United Nations Security Council did little more than observe the carnage for months. A nation's roadmap back from genocide is usually improvised. The tendency is to simply bury the past. But even some tiny semblance of closure can be crucial. On the April 6 anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, the nation’s culture ministry invited Rwandan survivors to watch a re-enactment of the nightmare: a powerful new film, "Shooting Dogs," directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy. The film, released in much of Europe last month, and expected to open in the United States later this year, is based on a story co-written by former British television journalist and documentary filmmaker David Belton, who observed portions of the genocide firsthand. Just after his return to Rwanda's capital, Kigali, where he first showed the film in late March for thousands of survivors, Belton spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Eric Pape. Excerpts: NEWSWEEK: How do you orchestrate a giant screening in a country that's still so devastated?

David Belton: We showed it at the Amahoro soccer stadium, and we could only use the covered portion because it was raining so horrendously hard. People walked for miles in the rainstorm to get there. It was quite remarkable. At one point, the giant inflatable screen began floating down the soccer pitch; I was holding onto it by a rope, and being dragged. Fortunately, Rwandans and diplomats threw off their coats and helped out. How did this film come about?

I was a journalist in Rwanda during the genocide. Afterwards, I was very British, very stiff-upper-lip: I didn’t talk about it. Then a priest there whom I'd known for a long time was killed, in 1998. Vjeko Curic who was one of these tough front-line missionaries you sometimes get in Africa. He had saved many people during the genocide—he probably saved my life, actually. So his death brought it all back to me. I'd always thought I’d done a perfectly fine job covering the genocide, but then I started to wonder how well I’d really done. I thought maybe I should have done more—and the West should have, too. The scenes involving the genocide must have been especially tough to film for the Rwandan crew.

It's odd. The process of making a film is so technical and laborious, and we had a wonderful atmosphere on the set—we filmed, and then we moved the camera, and then we’d have a cup of tea, and then go back to it. But there were some moments when I foresaw where we were going with the story, knew I’d seen enough, and walked away. Some of the Rwandans told me that they did the same. Overall, though, we were very careful. We had doctors, nurses, and trauma counselors on-set every day, in case people lapsed back into memories. We wanted people to feel protected and loved. It wasn’t a normal film set. And I think they got a lot out of it: a purifying of their soul through a visual recreation. Why did you decide to fictionalize the story?

If we'd wanted to make it completely real, we’d have made a documentary. In a drama, you have far less time to send out messages, so it's important to figure out which ones are key. You strip everything else away, as much as you can, and you use what moves you toward your main points. It almost feels like a horror film—characters trapped in a school with crazed killers pushing at the fences, the sense that the world is closing in. Yet it has the gravitas of reality.