When Hitler got his collaborators together and proposed the genocide of Jews, one of the things he said to justify the act was that before long the world will forget the whole thing. He is famed for having cited the example of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917, in which around a million people were estimated to have been killed) and said that after all, no one remembered such a thing had happened, so how different could it be this time around?

It seems that the same logic applied to the instigators of the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, one remark by a soldier in "Shooting Dogs," just before he takes a machete to a victim's head, says as much: "No one will remember you existed."

The point of films like "Shooting Dogs" and the earlier "Hotel Rwanda" is less about how well they're made than the fact that they're there: that they get on the international film distribution circuit, or that such films continue to be made, again and again. So what if these movies aren't hardcore documentaries? If entertainment value is what it takes to get audiences to see them, then I cast my vote to entertainment.