Roger Spottiswoode on the set of Shake Hands with the Devil Courtesy of Seville Pictures

"At first when I was shown the book, I thought: Why?" he says, admitting some initial hesitation. "They have made three other movies. But this is, in my mind, a completely different story. It is still Rwanda, it is still the genocide, but this is about what one can do, what we should have done, what we could do in the future, and the fact that there are remarkable people who will do it for us but we have to be involved as well."

Shake Hands With the Devil, a dramatization of events, is based on Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire's award-winning book of the same name. In 1993, a peace accord was signed in Rwanda that was to have ended the three-year old rebellion launched by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front. The United Nations dispatched Dallaire (played in the film by French-Canadian actor Roy Dupuis) to Rwanda to oversee the fragile peace process. On the ground, he encountered an under-funded UN peacekeeping operation choked with bureaucratic red tape and cobbled together with military units from various countries, each with slightly differing agendas.

Spottiswoode's indictment of the UN is tempered by an admiration for what had been achieved by so few: "I found as I read the book and got to know Dallaire and talked to other UN people, [that] it is a broken organization that we need to fix, because it is filled with a lot of very, very good people, very remarkable people who can do remarkable things. And even in this disaster, the people on the ground, 300 Ghanaians with Dallaire and a few officers and a Ghanaian general helped save 30,000 lives. One could say that they were of no use, [but] they were of use."

Like Dallaire, Spottiswoode reserves his condemnation for the international community that deserted Rwanda in her greatest hour of need. Troops were sent to Rwanda and Burundi by Western nations in the first week of the killings to evacuate their citizens. Then they left. On April 21, 1994, the United Nations Security Council, at the behest of the United States and others, voted to withdraw all but a fraction of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) that had originally been established to assist the implementation of the tentative peace agreement of 1993.

The United Nations, Spottiswoode posits, "could have been everything — if not the UN but the Security Council — if America, if the French and the Chinese had gotten off their asses instead of worrying about Tibet, and whether setting precedence would mean that we would have to talk about human rights in Tibet. So, in the end, I felt it is a film about us, about what we do about the UN, about activism and how the world pushes our countries into behaving properly at the UN and actually doing something about [such events]. I know it sounds complicated."

Dallaire had neither the authority nor the troops to halt the genocidal campaign, but he continued throughout the crisis to attempt to broker negotiations with the myriad of Hutu and Tutsi military leaders and politicians. When it became apparent that he could not stem the tide of violence, his appeals to his superiors — with political interests of their own — fell on deaf ears. When ordered to return home, he disobeyed. His best-equipped men withdrew, and the peace mission was cancelled. Dallaire's only chance at preventing further bloodshed was to garner media attention and shame the international community into action. Ultimately, he saved the lives of 30,000 people, but hundreds of thousands more were lost in the three months of terror.