Day 3: Les Massacres

There may be no more effective crash course in the way that movies can pervert and distort history for their own purposes than one I experienced during last year's Toronto Film Festival, when I sat through back-to-back screenings of Hotel Rwanda and Shake Hands with the Devil, the latter being an extraordinary documentary that helps to expose all the ludicrous methods by which the former attempts to turn one of the most awesome human tragedies of the 20th Century into an uplifting, triumph-over-adiversity melodrama. This year, as discussed in a previous post, it's another coldblooded massacre — this one of of Algerian protest marchers by French police on October 17, 1961 — that is the subject of multiple festival films. But that hasn't stopped there from being a new Rwanda movie too, even if — judging from the sparse turnout at yesterday morning's press screening — Rwanda has already outlived its usefulness as a buzz topic for film journalists.

The movie is Michael Caton-Jones' Shooting Dogs, and it filters the events of the genocide through the prism of the Ecole Technique Officielle, a Catholic school in the capital city of Kigali, where some 2,500 Tutsis and moderate Hutus sought refuge after the killing began, believing that the Belgian UN troops stationed there would protect them. The story is similar to that of Hotel Rwanda, only it doesn't have anything resembling a happy ending and it doesn't try to manufacture one — to wit, the end credits of the film (which, unlike Hotel Rwanda, was filmed on location in the real places where the events occurred) are punctuated with images of those crew members who lost family in the genocide. Shooting Dogs isn't without flaws — a great many of them, in fact: Like Glory and The Long Walk Home and countless other films made about expressly black subjects, it tells its tale through the eyes of two white martyrs — a British priest (John Hurt) and a wide-eyed young teacher (Hugh Dancy) — who, despite being based on on real persons, come across as a guilt-riddled apologia for all the whites (which is to say both people and houses) who might have acted to temper the Rwandan bloodletting. "See?" the movie seems to say. "We're not all bad."

But it was something other than white guilt, I fear, that kept the press and industry audience away from Shooting Dogs. Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the genocide and that meant that, until the calendar turned over, Rwanda was a good news story and even better water-cooler conversation. Eleventh anniversaries just don't have the same ring about them. Which is to not even ask why it took so long for most of the world (and its media) to wake up to Rwanda in the first place. (Though perhaps we should feel lucky, in that it took so much longer for the full specter of the Holocaust to come to light. And we are still learning new things about the French-Algerian war.) I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying that today is September 11, and while New Orleans recovers from an act of natural destruction, New York and Washington, D.C. remember a man-made one, and troops on the ground in the Middle East continue to play out its collateral damage. How long before we will be ready to walk into a cinema, in Toronto or elsewhere, and see the hard truths of those 21st-century atrocities made plain before our eyes?