Shake Hands with the Devil

Director Roger Spottiswoode brings a very special film realization of the acclaimed best-seller by General Roméo Dallaire to the screen in "Shake Hands with the Devil," the story of a Canadian commander torn between his duty and his conscience when he finds himself eyewitness to hell on Earth.

In 1993, the United Nations dispatches Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire (Roy Dupuis) to far off Rwanda to oversee a fragile cease-fire. A brilliant, workaholic officer and charismatic commander, Dallaire encounters the shabby reality of a typical UN peacekeeping operation: under-funded, overbureaucratic, and cobbled together from military units from dozens of countries, each with a slightly different agenda. Meanwhile, the peace agreement between the rebels, led by the minority Tutsi ethnic group, and the French-supported government dominated by the Hutu majority group, turns out to rest on shaky ground. When an unknown group shoots down the Rwandan President’s plane, the storm breaks and a secret but long-planned genocidal campaign against the Tutsi minority begins with a night of terror in Kigali. A reporter (Deborah Unger) remains in-country and follows General Dellaire as he is forced to deal with far-away superiors and the studied indifference of the world’s great powers while trying to take decisive action to stop the genocide of over 800,000 innocent civilians.

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL “gets much closer to the heart of the matter” than other films on the subject. (Peter Howell, Toronto Star)