'Beyond the Gates'

Last night I watched a movie called 'Beyond the Gates' (it was released as 'Shooting Dogs' outside the U.S.). The film follows the story of the events that took place at the Ecole Technique Officielle in Kigali, Rwanda, during April of 1994. The school served as a base for the Belgian UN peace-keeping troops and, once fighting broke out in the city, became a refuge for two thousand, five hundred Tutsi refugees. However, after ten Belgian soldiers were murdered by Hutu militia, the UN forces were given orders to retreat to the airport. As soon as the soldiers withdrew, the militia who surrounded the school attacked and all within were killed.

While I did not find this to be a particularly impressive film (contrary to reviews, apparently), I did find it incredibly eerie. The film was shot in Kigali in 2004 so the buildings, the hills, the clothing and everything else is familiar. There are a number of scenes in which I recognize specific buildings and specific views. There are lines in Kinyarwanda that I understand (and I can tell that most of the actors are not Rwandan from their accents). There are references to sections of the city and places where I work and that I frequently visit.

Even the details are haunting. The dogs are the same village mutts as the one several of my friends adopted. The bottles of beer are the same as the ones I drank this weekend. The mattresses are the same foam on which I sleep each night.

The most striking aspect, though, may actually come after the film is over. During the credits, faces of Rwandans involved in the making of the film are shown with brief stories of how they were affected by the genocide. For example, "so-and-so lost both her parents and five brothers and sisters", "so-and-so lost twenty-two members of his mother's family", "so-and-so hid in a cess pit for fourteen days and survived", etc. What is most haunting about these pictures and these statements is that, now, I actually know more than one of these so-and-so's. These are individuals who I have met, with whom I have taken lunch, with whom I have spent entire days. And, suddenly, each so-and-so portrayed in the film becomes one of my coworkers or friends - the woman who lost her husband, the boy who lost his parents, the woman who barely escaped across the border and was refused at the hospital because doctors assumed she would die, the girl who lost her brother and so on and so on and so on.