John Hurt attends premiere of genocide film

A British-German film about the 1994 Rwandan genocide premiered in the country’s capital tonight, where it was shot in its entirety.

The screening of Shooting Dogs, starring John Hurt, took place in a soccer stadium in Kigali.

It was disrupted by a heavy rain storm, but still produced a deeply emotional response among survivors of the genocide.

Speciose Kanyabugoyi, 55, was among the 1,500 people who attended the showing.

“I have no words to explain what I feel,” he said after the movie, which included massacre scenes filmed where they actually took place in Kigali.

“We were abandoned, I hope this film explains that reality to the world.”

British actor John Hurt, who plays a priest who runs a school caught up in the violence, said the film focuses on the moral lessons of what happened here more than a decade ago.

“It’s a wake-up call – to the fact that the world is not made up of goodies and baddies but of people who can be twisted and bent in all kinds of shapes,” Hurt told journalists in Kigali.

Shooting Dogs depicts the first six days of the genocide as it happened at a high school.

The capital’s main sports stadium, where the film was shown, was also the scene of the slaughter of hundreds of Rwandans.

In the audience were students of the Ecole Technique Officielle who survived the genocide.

Some of those survivors also acted as extras in the film that director Michael Caton-Jones shot at the school in a documentary style.

In 100 days, extremist Hutu officials and militias killed at least 500,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in the genocide.

Shooting Dogs is the latest foreign film on the genocide to be released. Recent productions include the 2005 Oscar-nominated feature Hotel Rwanda, which was filmed in South Africa.