shooting dogs... insult upon genocide?

I knew there was something up this morning when I saw the actor John Hurt, a co-star and director of new film Shooting Dogs on SKY News. They did not have the usual confidence of people publicising a new film, but seemed like they had come to defend the movie instead. Shooting Dogs is about a massacre that took place in a school in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Part-funded by the BBC, the film places the broadcasting corporation's journalists in the centre of the action and in the words of some, portrays them as the heros. But those who were there at the time remember things differently, and that's just the beginning of it.

Makers of the film hope the fact that they filmed on location in Rwanda gives them an advantage over other movies like Hotel Rwanda for instance, which was shot in South Africa. During the making Shooting Dogs, some survivors of the genocide suffered flashbacks and were so traumatised that they had to be sedated. The cast replied that this happened only on one occasion, a defence that doesn't really help matters all that much. Oh, and the "Rwandans asked us to come and shoot this story in their country" - was another soundbite. You couldn't miss the euphemism... replace 'Rwandan people' with 'Rwandan government' that was obviously tempted by the money such filming would generate.

The more makers of Shooting Dogs defended their film, the more uncomfortable they looked and the more concerned I got. It turned out they'd been forced to come on television because The Observer newspaper (UK) was going at them on two fronts in today's paper. Opening the paper a short time later, I saw why.

The first piece - on page 6 of the new-look paper - is Anger at BBC genocide film by Alice O'Keefe. Even more forceful is the piece by Linda Melvern (who wrote the book Conspiracy to Murder. The Rwandan Genocide, published by Verso) on page 32. Melvern is damning. History? This film is fiction - she declares.