Hugh Dancy Looks Back At "Beyond the Gates"

Beyond the Gates (known as Shooting Dogs in the U.K.) tackles a real-life incident from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where a school in Kigali housed some 2,500 Tutsi refugees for a brief time before the UN abandoned them to be murdered by Hutu militias.

The Roman Catholic school, the École Technique Officelle, doubled as a base for the UN to supervise the peace between the Hutu and Tutsi, before the genocide started. As someone bearing witness to the events that take place, the well-intentioned English teacher Joe Connor, played by Hugh Dancy, becomes the conduit for the audience.

“My job was to take the temperature of any given scene, and try to convey that,” Dancy told Current. “But it never occurred to me until after I watched the finished film to think of Joe as the conduit. I just thought about him as someone who starts out as an innocent, and as things progress, his innocence is exposed as naivety, and that naivety turns into denial when he can’t actually look at events. I was sympathetic towards him.”

Joe hasn’t been in Africa long – perhaps four months – when the world starts imploding around him. Or rather, outside the school, as refugees have started to trickle in looking for a safe place, and what could be safer than a religious school guarded by UN troops? (A supposition that later proves to be false, since the troops have been instructed not to shoot unless shot at first, which leaves them free to shoot, say, wild dogs, but not men with machetes). The school is ill-equipped for the large influx of those seeking asylum, however, so Joe seeks to find ways to provide for the growing crowd.

“There’s a moment I remember where I’m running around the school, breaking up the furniture in my room to turn it into firewood,” Dancy said, “and this one shot I remember is kind of a sigh of relief, as if now I’ve done something, as if it were in fact a classic achievement, when in fact I’ve really done absolutely nothing at all. Joe is consoling himself into thinking he’s done something, and God knows we’ve all done at that at different times, although not under these circumstances.”

The scenes at the school didn’t take place on a soundstage, but at the actual École Technique Officelle in Kigali, Rwanda – and it was shot on the ten year anniversary of the genocide.

“No doubt that augmented my acting and the movie as a whole for very obvious reasons,” Dancy said. “You only have to be told what happened and wander around for it to hit you. It’s a small country, and there’s no corner that doesn’t have ghosts.”

Beyond the Gates airs on Current TV on Friday, January 28 at 12 am ET/9 pm PT.