Kigali, Rwanda: It’s more red tape than red carpet as the feature Shake Hands with the Devil shoots on location in this once-bloody African nation.

The $10-million production dramatizing the 100 days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide – as seen through the eyes of retired Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire – first had to contend with 400,000 pounds of production gear being shipped from Canada, including eight cameras for two units, which got held up in customs for a month.

As well, with Rwanda lacking a car-rental outlet, vehicles had to be hired from private owners.

Then there were sets that had to be built with machetes and handsaws after power tools, ladders and even paintbrushes were found to be in short supply.

‘It’s like building sets 200 years ago,’ sighs production designer Lindsey Hermer-Bell.

Then, midway through the 30-day shoot, production was halted in downtown Kigali after a senior intelligence officer in the office of Rwandan President Paul Kagame rang through with security concerns.

Nervous mandarins in the Chinese Embassy – in front of which director Roger Spottiswoode was shooting a scene in which Dallaire, played by Roy Dupuis (Maurice Richard), and an aide come upon a roadblock manned by angry, drunken militiamen – were thought to be the original source of the complaint.

‘We’ve had a tank parked outside the Chinese Embassy all morning,’ coproducer Laszlo Barna says ruefully, surveying a scene of burnt-out cars and army trucks.

With permit in hand and patience running out, Barna tells his team of local fixers to get the shut-down order lifted, while around him actors playing soldiers in UN battledress and Hutu militiamen – stamping and shrieking with machetes and clubs in hand – break off rehearsals for the next sequence.

Suddenly, someone warns Barna that the complaining intelligence officer has Kagame’s ear.

‘I have Kagame’s ear, too. We’ll see who has the bigger mouth,’ he responds, and threatens to have himself arrested. The more stoic Spottiswoode next approaches and recommends that the set be shifted down the road.

‘We need the police every day,’ he reminds Barna. ‘They’ve been nice to us so far.’

Eventually, the film’s government liaison strikes a deal with Kigali’s assistant inspector of police, Aristaque Murara, who has been on the phone with the president’s intelligence office. Murara allows shooting to resume well away from the sightlines of Beijing’s diplomats, ending the production delay.

All in a day’s shooting in Rwanda, where the African nation is rebuilding after the 1994 murderous rampage of Hutu extremists, and the Canadian producers are dealing with the complications of shooting historical events where they occurred.

‘They have their own bureaucratic process, and we’ve had to stop and understand what that process is,’ says supervising producer Peter Meyboom. ‘We’ve had to be diplomatic and explain to officials what this monstrous machinery rolling through their country is all about.’

The project is coproduced by Barna, Arnie Gelbart of Galafilm Productions and Michael Donovan, whose Halifax Film Company joined forces with Barna-Alper Productions last year on what had been competing efforts to make the movie.

Barna knows he’s taken a gamble by shooting Shake Hands almost entirely in Rwanda, with a crew of about 250 people – key creatives from Canada, with local Rwandans, Kenyans and South Africans as supporting cast and technical backup.

But he says the epic about the horrors Dallaire witnessed as head of the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission demanded an African shoot. The drama, like the documentary of the same name and Dallaire’s book before it, follows the peacekeeper’s failed efforts to stop the Rwandan genocide.

‘The British go to India to follow their heroes, and the Americans go to Omaha or Juno Beach. And we shoot our heroes in Kleinburg?’ Barna asks, referring to the small studio town north of Toronto. ‘That’s wrong.’

Shake Hands will follow the similarly set Un dimanche à Kigali – from director Robert Favreau, which burned up the Quebec box office earlier this summer – and the John Hurt-starrer Shooting Dogs, which opened on July 28.

In addition, Nick Nolte’s UN commander character in the Oscar-winning Hotel Rwanda was loosely based on Dallaire.

Despite the string of Rwandan genocide flicks already in the marketplace, Barna sees potential for the Seville Pictures release, due out sometime in 2007, as his character-driven drama portrays a man Canadians know well.

‘We are hoping audiences will agree with us and embrace the film as readily as they have embraced general Dallaire,’ he says.

Dallaire, now a senator, also had a hand in wooing Spottiswoode, after the two men spent a day together.

‘I wouldn’t be doing the picture if Dallaire wasn’t such a rich and tragic figure,’ says Spottiswoode. The Ottawa-born, British-raised director of The 6th Day and the James Bond thriller Tomorrow Never Dies turned down Barna’s original offer to direct the picture in 2003. The pitch was made over a crackling cell phone line.

‘I thought it was a Canadian devil movie and I wasn’t going to do one of those,’ he says.

The script by Simon Barry and Yves Simoneau went through a number of rewrites. At one time, a miniseries was considered. A script with a western journalist narrating was also discarded. Finally, Barna and Donovan agreed to hew closely to Dalliare’s bestselling memoir.

Dupuis, interviewed between takes, says playing Dallaire has been demanding. Learning English lines takes the Quebec star three times longer than those in French. He is also faced with recreating scenes of the genocide in the very buildings and streets where the original events unfolded.

‘It kicks in when we’re shooting that this is where events took place, and you have to remember we’re still shooting a movie,’ he says.

The recreations in Shake Hands with the Devil are made all the more macabre by 40 life-like corpses – or ‘artificial cadavers’ as they’re called in the trade -­ constructed in Toronto by visual effects creators A. Scott Hamilton and Maya Kulenovic. They were shipped to Rwanda at a cost of around $100,000.

‘I’m just hoping my babies behave – and horrify,’ says Hamilton, as he positions half-nude corpses in a river for a penultimate scene in which Dallaire crosses a pontoon bridge, discovers dead bodies floating, and is paralyzed with horror.

The cast also includes James Gallanders and Tom McCamus (as Dallaire’s military assistants, Brent Beardsley and Phil Lancaster) and Deborah Kara Unger as an American journalist.

Toronto-based Martin Katz helped secure financing for the project as executive producer. The funders include CBC and Radio-Canada, The Movie Network, Movie Central, Super Écran, Telefilm Canada and The Harold Greenberg Fund.