Dog Days

The west African country of Upper Guinea is trapped in the relentless cycle of butchery and bloodshed that leads to civil war. Thousands have already died, but it's one small, savage killing that captures the imaginations of the media - that of beautiful young British aid worker Miranda Williams.

And now disenchanted former war correspondent-turned-television-film maker Peter Lucas must go back, against his better judgement, into this war zone. His brief is to make a documentary about the dead British girl. For Lucas and his experienced crew it should be a pretty straightforward job: go in, shoot, and get out. Fast.

But seconded to his team is Laura Marlow, an attractive, aggressively ambitious and somewhat naive assistant producer, and she has other ideas. Determined to make her mark in this intensely combative world of television reportage, she wants to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Miranda Williams' violent death, whatever it takes.

And so they find themselves in the shell-scarred old colonial hotel on the shores of the Atlantic and with them, gathering like flies around a corpse, are the egos, lunatics and adrenaline junkies of the world's media. As they go about their business, cynically manipulating the terrible chaos and human suffering into the stories they believe the world wants to see, it becomes clear they are oblivious to the madness at work in their midst . . .

Explosive, intelligent and utterly compelling, 'Dog Days' is a thrilling, disturbing journey into the darkest recesses of the human soul.