Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire

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In Theaters: January 22, 2005 (limited)

1h 31m | Documentary

Shake Hands with the Devil is 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 - sometimes comically shabby - reality of a typical UN peacekeeping operation: under-funded, over-bureaucratic, 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. Conciliatory speeches are undercut by mysterious massacres.

Just months after Dallaire raises the UN flag, an unknown group shoots down the President's plane.

Are the rebels to blame or the Hutu extremists in the President's own party? (To this day, nobody knows.) With the plane crash, the storm breaks and a secret but long-planned genocidal campaign against the Tutsi minority begins with a night of terror in Kigali.