Shake Hands with the Devil
2004 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Peter Raymont
Genres: biography, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Lt-General Roméo Dallaire returns to Rwanda in April 2004, ten years after commanding United Nations peacekeepers during the genocide that killed 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu people. The journey confronts his psychological trauma from witnessing mass murder he could not stop.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the genocide doc to genuflect at trauma—Raymont refuses, instead letting Dallaire's fractured return speak louder than any moral consensus ever could, which is exactly why it unsettles.
Raymont's formal restraint—the way he structures Dallaire's return as a physical and psychological re-entry rather than catharsis—situates this squarely in the tradition of rigorous documentary portraiture, the kind that earns its weight through compositional integrity and temporal precision.
The decision to film Dallaire moving through Rwanda again, a decade later, rather than relying on archive or voiceover testimony, transforms what could've been a standard witness account into something visceral—his body in the space becomes the whole film.