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.