Talk:Shake Hands with the Devil (book)

About the documentary

I still do not think the documentary was based on OR was inspired by the book. The documentary is about Gen Dallaire's return to Rwanda and his confrontation with his, shall I say, "demons" that had been haunting him for so long.

A documentary based on a book (or a book based on a documentary) runs almost with the same flow with the book. See, for example, Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Those having read the book felt at home watching the documentary as it followed from the documentary and both were 'authored' the same year. Those having watched the Gen Dallaire documentary might remember a troubled Dallaire trying to cope with the "demons", whereas the book was about those demons (and no quote-unquote here).

What do you folks think? mu5ti/✏ 21:46, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)

Having seen the film and read the book I agree they don't share very much in common. There is no question that the film was not based on the book. However, I would not discount whether it was "inspired by" book. Would the film have been made the way it was without the book? I think it wouldn't. Without the book there wouldn't have been such a focus on the character of Dallaire. All the inner emotion he put into the book allowed for others to delve deeper into his personality. This is clearly what the film does. Though the title is a bit misleading to have people believe that the film is based on the book, I think the book was likely the inspiration of the film.

In any event, ideally while they should be separate articles, I think the strongest reason to keep them together is that an article for the film alone would be very small and would not develop beyond a stub for a long time if ever. PullUpYourSocks 23:40, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Good points. I will change the main article accordingly. mu5ti/✏ 00:22, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)

Please see the summary of the film on the Parisian film festival site, as hosted on the film's official website. It says that "this is the story [of Dallaire's memoirs in a book of the same title] in film":

The 4th International Human Rights Film Festival ended last night with the awards ceremony. The 1st prize in the Creative Documentary section was awarded to Peter Raymont’s film Shake Hands with the Devil (Canada 2004), which follows the footsteps of general Roméo Dallaire, head of the UN peace mission during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. His vain attempts to alert the international community went unheard. In 2003, he released his memoirs in a book of the same title. This is the story in film. Shake Hands with the Devil has been shown in 45 countries (including Belgium) but has yet to be released in France. It was shown in its full-length version during the Festival.

That makes the at least-intended connection between the book and the film (posted on the film's official site) very specific. I dispute the previous comment that "there is no question that the film was not based on the book." Of course, it was at least "in part based" on the book, and it was also (initially) "inspired" by the book; it presents a follow up to the book ("return visit" by Dallaire). Details presented in the documentary film about Dallaire's experience at least in part are stated to have derived from and thus be "based" on his own account in his own memoirs in that sense. So this film is not merely "inspired" by a book. The fact that the filmmakers use the title of his book as the title of the film (changing the lower case w to an uppercase w in their official site) makes the overt connection between the two works clear. They would also have had to get copyright permission and authorization from Dallaire himself to use his title for their film in this manner. See the supporting quotation and citation added to the article on the film today about the filmmakers' acquiring the "documentary rights" to the book from Dallaire for the purpose of making the film that they did make in the manner that they made it. NYScholar 18:41, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 13:47, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

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