Focus on Canadian Film: Beginning of the 3rd Millennium 2005 / Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire / Canada 2004
Ten years after the Rwandan genocide, Canadian documentarist Peter Raymont and crew set out with General Dallaire on the trail of the mass murder. Period and present-day footage is narrated by a troubled man - then UN representative - whose guilt stems from his inability to fulfil his peacekeeping mission and stop the killing.
Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, a film crew headed up by Canadian documentarist Peter Raymont travelled to Africa, to the scenes of the massacre. They accompanied retired General Roméo Dallaire, who ‘failed’ in his mission as head of the United Nations peacekeeping force. Given the lack of assistance, he was absolutely powerless to avert the catastrophe – and the world passively looked on. During 100 days of massacre in 1994, some 800,000 people perished in clashes between two opposing ethnic groups during which extremist Hutus murdered Tutsis. Shaken, Dallaire took on the burden of guilt for the brutal mass murder, losing all inner calm forever (he suffers from insomnia and twice tried to commit suicide). Years later he returns to the places visited by the horror. The film combines archive shots from the massacre with footage of contemporary Rwanda.
90 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Peter Raymont
/ Screenplay podle knihy/based on the book by Roméa Dallaira Shake Hands with the Devil
/ Dir. of Photography John Westheauser
/ Music Mark Korven
/ Editor Michele Hozer
/ Producer Peter Raymont
/ Production White Pine Pictures, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Société Radio-Canada
/ Contact Telefilm Canada, Films Transit International Inc.
Peter Raymont is a Canadian documentarist with more than 100 films to his credit who subscribes to John Grierson’s definition of a documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality.” While in Rwanda shooting the documentary Rwanda: In Search of Hope (1999), he first began thinking about a film on Dallaire, who at the time was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Raymont’s films bear witness to inhuman conditions and war violence all around the world, including two documentaries on the war in Nicaragua: The World Is Watching (1988) and The World Stopped Watching (2003).
Telefilm Canada
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Phone: +1 514 283 636 3
Fax: +1 514 283 236 5
E-mail: [email protected]
Films Transit International Inc.
252 Gouin Boulevard East, H3L 1A8, Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Phone: +1 514 844 3358
Fax: +1 514 844 7298
E-mail: [email protected]
Brigitte Hubmann
Film Institution Rep.
Jean Claude Mahé
Film Institution Rep.
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