Dupuis goes from The Rocket to Rwanda

Canadian actor Roy Dupuis is going from one Canadian legend to another, having been cast to play UN special forces commander Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire in a new film being produced for Canada’s pay movie channels and the CBC.

Principal photography on the film, entitled Shake Hands with the Devil, is slated to begin in Kigali, Rwanda mid-June. Dupuis, who recently played Canada’s famed hockey player Maurice Richard in CBC biopic The Rocket, will star as Dallaire in the film, which is being directed by Roger Spottiswoode (Ripley Under Ground, Tomorrow Never Dies).

Based on Dallaire’s best selling memoir also entitled Shake Hands with the Devil, the film will chronicle how in 1994, Dallaire served as Force Commander of the United Nations spearheading a small mission to Rwanda. His pleas for international military support and media coverage were virtually ignored as over 800k people were savagely slaughtered within 100 days.

Dallaire’s struggle with the emotional aftermath of his time in Rwanda was recently retold in the Peter Raymont’s CBC backed documentary film Shake Hands With the Devil, which won a Banff Rockie Award at the festival last year.

This latest dramatic film is being produced by Laszlo Barna (Barna-Alper Productions) and Michael Donovan (DHX) and will be theatrically distributed in Canada by Seville Pictures.

Pay channels The Movie Network, Movie Central, and Super Écran have signed on for broadcast rights, along with the CBC and its French-language network Radio-Canada.