Alan White

11 year-old Skunk lives a carefree life with her loving father (Tim Roth), brother and nanny. Her afternoons are full of daydreams and curious wanderings around her neighborhood. One day, Skunk witnesses her angry neighbor, Mr. Oswald savagely beat Rick, a psychologically-troubled young man who lives across the street. Skunk is unwittingly drawn into her neighbors' unfolding melodrama involving violence, sex, and life-shattering illness. As Skunk's innocence begins to vanish, her home, neighborhood and school all become treacherous environments where the happy certainties of childhood give way to fear-filled doubt. Overwhelmed by her experiences, Skunk is drawn into an ethereal chaos from which she may only return through the intense love of those closest to her.

In 1993, the United Nations dispatches Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire (Roy Dupuis) to far off Rwanda to oversee a fragile cease-fire. A brilliant, workaholic officer and charismatic commander, Dallaire encounters the shabby reality of a typical UN peacekeeping operation: under-funded, overbureaucratic, and cobbled together from military units from dozens of countries, each with a slightly different agenda. Meanwhile, the peace agreement between the rebels, led by the minority Tutsi ethnic group, and the French-supported government dominated by the Hutu majority group, turns out to rest on shaky ground. When an unknown group shoots down the Rwandan President's plane, the storm breaks and a secret but long-planned genocidal campaign against the Tutsi minority begins with a night of terror in Kigali. A reporter (Deborah Unger) remains in-country and follows General Dellaire as he is forced to deal with far-away superiors and the studied indifference of the world's great powers while trying to take decisive action to stop the genocide of over 800,000 innocent civilians.