Preview
SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL
Featuring Romeo Dallaire
Directed by Peter Raymont
Opens Friday, February 4
Uptown Screen
Canadian filmmaker Peter Raymont’s recent trip to the Sundance Film Festival was a memorable one. In fact, Raymont says going to Utah to support his 2004 film, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, in competition was amazing.
"Robert Redford came to our première," says the director-producer. "He apparently never goes to public screenings because he gets mobbed, but he came to our film.
"He got up in front of all of these people and said, ‘A film like this is why we created the Sundance Film Festival.’" To the Canadian veteran of over 100 documentary projects, that praise was a filmmaker’s dream.
Redford’s stamp of approval and the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Audience Award will certainly heighten the buzz around this amazingly powerful film. Shake Hands with the Devil follows the now-retired Dallaire, a former UN general, during his first trip back to the country of Rwanda, where he was head of a peacekeeping mission more than 10 years ago, during the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi people there. At the site of the actual events, Dallaire recounts some of the searing and brutal images he continues to carry with him from those 100 days of unrelenting murder in 1994. He also passes along his many regrets for the inability of his rather small band of poorly supplied peacekeepers to do much of anything to stem the tide of violence.
Though a condensed version of Shake Hands with the Devil has already aired on CBC Television’s The Passionate Eye, the Gemini Award-winning director hopes people will be interested in seeing the theatrical cut of the film.
"There are 35 more minutes of footage," he says. "You just get deeper into the general’s psyche and into his emotions and feelings. We tell more parts of the story. There are more ingredients, more nuances and the film has a different pace to it."
Over his long, distinguished career, Raymont’s films have taken him all over the globe from Nicaragua to the Arctic. He had also been to Africa for previous films, including an earlier work in Rwanda (2000’s Rwanda: In Search of Hope). But the voyage he took with Dallaire has marked him in ways like no other project.
"We saw a lot of stuff with him in those 12 days," he says. "We were with him from six in the morning until 10 in the evening every day."
One of the most emotionally charged parts of the trip and the documentary was the former general’s visit to the National University of Rwanda. In a packed stadium, Dallaire delivered a raw, emotional speech without notes.
"That was extraordinary, unbelievable and electric," says Raymont, recalling the event. "It was also very strange because towards the end of his speech this thunderstorm began…. The rumbling of the thunder, as he spoke about how the international community failed these people, is very powerful. People were hanging on his every word. He spoke for over an hour and it was spellbinding."
Raymont is grateful for having spent so much time with the former Canadian military commander. Dallaire joined him at Sundance, where he signed many copies of his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, and was treated like a celebrity.
"He’s a very impressive human being," says Raymont of Dallaire. "It was a great honour to make this film with him. I have been making films for 33 years and it’s very rare that you get this sort of opportunity." |
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