Shooting Dogs

Shooting Dogs is set in Rwanda in 1994, during the genocide in which Hutu extremists killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi over roughly one hundred days. At a secondary school in Kigali, a veteran priest named Christopher and a young English teacher, Joe Connor, run the grounds and teach. As the violence spreads after the president's assassination, Tutsi civilians take refuge inside the school, which becomes a shelter. United Nations peacekeepers initially guard the compound, but when they are ordered to withdraw, the Rwandans are left behind, and the two Europeans must decide whether to stay with them or leave the country while they still can. The film follows the events largely through Joe's perspective.

Michael Caton-Jones directed from a screenplay by David Wolstencroft; the producers were Pippa Cross, Jens Meurer and David Belton. John Hurt plays Christopher and Hugh Dancy plays Joe, with Dominique Horwitz, Nicola Walker, David Gyasi and Steve Toussaint among the supporting cast. The film was a German-British co-production backed by BBC Film, the UK Film Council, ZDF and Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen. It runs 115 minutes and was released in March 2006, opening the same year as Caton-Jones's Basic Instinct 2 and standing between that film and Asher in his filmography. It holds a 7.5 rating on TMDB from 168 votes, while its critics' score is 7.3 from 65 reviews, close to the audience figure and suggesting a broadly positive response from both groups.