Ivan Strasburg

Beyond the Gates -- In April 1994, after the airplane of the Hutu President of Rwanda is shot down, the Hutu militias slaughter the Tutsi population. In the Ecole Technique Officielle, the Catholic priest Christopher and the idealistic English teacher Joe Connor lodge two thousand and five hundred Rwandans refugees, under the protection of the Belgian UN force and under siege by Hutu militia. When the Tutsi refugees are abandoned by the UN, they are murdered by the extremist militia.

Bloody Sunday -- A dramatization of the Irish civil rights protest march and subsequent massacre by British troops on January 30, 1972.

In April 1994, a secondary school in Kigali, Rwanda, being used as a UN army base, became a refugee camp. Belgian UN troops, school children, NGO workers and over 2,500 Tutsi citizens and their sympathizers took refuge against a raging genocide while the Hutu militia, clad with machetes, clamored outside the school gates. Five days later, the UN troops withdrew from the school, taking the whites with them. Within hours, almost all of the Rwandans were dead. BEYOND THE GATES is about the choices we make when we are free to choose.

In April 1994, a secondary school in Kigali, Rwanda called the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO), being used as a UN army base, became a refugee camp. Belgian UN troops, school children, NGO workers and over 2,500 Tutsi citizens and their sympathizers took refuge against a raging genocide while the Hutu militia, clad with machetes, clamored outside the school gates. Five days later, the UN troops withdrew from the school, taking the whites with them. Within hours, almost all of the Rwandans were dead. Beyond The Gates is about the choices we make when we are free to choose. In the tragic circumstances of the Ecole Technique Officielle, would you have left with the UN troops on the fifth day or would you have stayed?