As The Eagles might have sung, there's plenty of room at the Hotel Rwanda; enough, it appears, for another harrowing drama set during the 1994 genocide that saw almost a million Tutsis butchered by Hutu extremists. Unlike Terry George's film, though, Shooting Dogs replays this appalling episode from a white man's perspective: that of idealistic young teacher Hugh Dancy, who finds the school-cum-mission he runs with John Hurt's priest become a sanctuary for some 2,500 refugees.
With Hutus massing outside, there's no way this will end happily and as Michael Caton-Jones' impressively mounted film nears its conclusion, the emotional impact is almost overwhelming. Curiously, though, the decision to view the carnage through Dancy's eyes distances us, making this story less the tragedy of a million dead Africans than that of a couple of impotent Westerners.
