Days of Glory

To be shown: 9 June 2008

France/Morocco/Algeria/Belg 2006.
Director: Rachid Bouchareb.
Starring: Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem.
Certificate 12A. 128 minutes.

Synopsis

In 1943, four young men from France's North African colonies join up to help liberate from the Nazis a ‘motherland' they have never seen.
But as this naïve, likeable band of brothers from Algeria, Morocco and Senegal slog their way through Italy and into France they discover it's not just the Germans they are fighting, but also the prejudices of their French commanders. The ‘natives' are not allowed weekend leave or even tomatoes with their dinner, let alone recognition for valour or promotion. They march through winter snow in sandals while their officers travel in jeeps making patriotic speeches – but it's not so easy to continue believing in the patriotic ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité when you're being sacrificed as cannon fodder to locate German gun positions.
Yet these North African soldiers retain a touching excitement at the thought of being on French soil for the first time – and the ordinary citizens are delighted with their liberators. But the French Army, riven with institutional racism, cannot bear to treat its colonial recruits as equals. When one falls for a young French woman his correspondence is intercepted and censored to keep them apart.
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Days of Glory missed out to Das Leben der Anderen. However, the film – which has been known to leave French cinema audiences in tears – achieved something far greater. After watching it, President Jacques Chirac agreed to restore indigenous veterans' pensions, frozen since the colonial wars of independence in the 1950s.
But aside from its political importance, dramatic, Spielberg-trumping action sequences and beguiling cinematography, what really marks this film out is the acting. So stunning are the performances across the board that the jury at last year's Cannes Film Festival awarded the Best Actor prize to the entire male ensemble cast.

Notes

As well as its success at Cannes, Days of Glory won the Best Writing prize and was nominated in eight other categories at France's Cesar Awards in 2007.
The actors, all of French Arab or Berber descent, did not know of the discrimination against North African soldiers before making the film.
As part of the armistice agreement following France's defeat in 1940, the Germans left the French empire nominally intact on condition the French government dropped out of the war. The Vichy Government then pursued a policy of racial discrimination in its African territories.
France's French Equatorial colonies of Cameroon, Chad, Moyen-Congo, Oubangui-Chari and Niger heard General de Gaulle's call to resist and joined the Free French side.
Not yet ready to invade mainland Europe, in late 1942 the Allies began a new offensive in Algeria and French Morocco (Operation Torch), and later Tunisia, the success of which allowed more men of the French empire to join the war against Germany. France's West African colonies then also abandoned Vichy and declared for Free France.
France's 1 Corps, demobilized in 1940, was reconstituted in August 1943 in Algeria. Of its 200,000 soldiers, 130,000 were ‘natives' comprising 110,000 North Africans and 20,000 black Africans. The Corps fought in the Italian campaign, the campaign to liberate France in 1944 and to invade Germany in 1945.
In recognition of the war effort by the African colonies, in 1944 a conference with Free French leaders was held in Brazzaville, Congo. The conference recommended greater administrative freedom in France's African colonies ushering in the era of great political and social change that would see those same colonies gain independence over the next two decades.
The Algerian War of Independence began in 1954 and shook the French Fourth Republic (1946-58) to its foundations. Finally, President Charles de Gaulle, seeing independence as inevitable, granted it in 1962 to the fury of many in France. The war remains a controversial subject. Indeed, it was only in June 1999 that the French government officially acknowledged that a war – rather than a public order operation – had taken place.
In August 2004, France paid tribute to the soldiers of Operation Dragoon, including tens of thousands of Africans, who had staged the assault on the French Riviera 60 years previously. King Mohammed VI of Morocco, 13 African heads of state and representatives of eight other nations joined President Jacques Chirac for the celebrations. It was, according to the Associated Press, the first time the African veterans had been honoured with such military pomp and fanfare.