Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. This film examines the three pillars on which the French Republic stands through the eyes of soldiers summoned from its colonies to fight a war for liberalising a people, while enjoying few of those rights themselves. Put into the worst of battles towards the end of World War II, with the least compensation in terms of money, promotion, leave or even rationed tomatoes, soldiers from France’s colonies in North Africa - particularly Algeria - fight a cold, brutal war and die an unknown death. The Government they are fighting for feels no need to understand their religion, needs or culture.
Days of Glory (French: Indigènes) is a French drama film directed by French-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb. The cast includes Sami Bouajila, Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem and Bernard Blancan. The film won the Prix d'interprétation masculine at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but lost to The Lives of Others
(http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/lives-of-others.html ). As well as being successful as a war movie described as a kind of a North African Saving Private Ryan, the film deals with discriminatory treatment of French Africans (the French title translates as Natives) which is still an issue today, and led to a change in government policy.
A large number of indigènes (Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccan Goumiers) were enrolled in the French First Army of the Free French Forces, formed to liberate France after the Nazi occupation in World War II. The film portrays the recruitment of these soldiers and their participation in the campaigns in Italy and southern France. The army had been recruited in Africa in French colonies outside the control of the Vichy regime which collaborated with German commissioners.
Four Indigènes in a mobile corps with a reputation for endurance and courage in close combat are sent to the front line, each with a different personal purpose as they fight their way through the Italian Campaign and on to Operation Dragoon to liberate France. One seeks booty, one has joined the army to escape poverty in hopes that it will be his family, one wants to marry and settle in France while the other is fighting in the hope of equality and recognition of the rights of the colonised Algerians. They encounter only discrimination in the army.
Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Oscars and the Golden Palm at Cannes, Days of Glory has some exceptional performances by its lead actors, who have all enlisted in the war for their own reasons. There is the scholarly and brave Corporal Abdelkadar (Bouajila), who clings to the belief till the very end that the fight against Hitler is his fight; Said (Debbouze), who aims to find reason and hope in his life, led till then in utter poverty, in a place he realises has none of it; Messaoud (Zem), who discovers love in the unlikeliest of places; and Sergeant Martinez (Blancan), a Frenchman in Algeria who is part African, a secret he takes to his grave, constantly torn between the men he knows are being mistreated and his bosses who couldn’t care less.
While each has his own motives, these native Africans have enlisted to fight for a France they have never seen. In the words of a wartime recruiting song the four actors sing within the film as well as at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, "we come from the colonies to save the motherland, we come from afar to die, we are the men of Africa." The film shows a complex depiction of their shabby treatment in an army organisation prejudiced in favour of the European French, a wartime injustice which relates directly to continuing modern tensions.
In a great scene, after one hard-fought battle, the tired African soldiers are offered a “treat”: ballet in a torn tent. Uncomprehending and disgusted, they walk out. After defeating the Axis powers in Italy, when the Algerian infantry marches into France, it is the first time they set foot on what they have been told is their “motherland”. The message is reinforced through martial songs, in speeches, and exhortations to march to yet another battle.
From a small dusty village in Algeria, illiterate and swept up in all that’s happening around him, Said has figured it out for himself more clearly. Describing a battle scene, he says: “I threw a bomb at Germany, I beat Germany, all of Germany - I free a country, it is my country. Even if I haven’t seen it before.”
The discrimination by the French authorities against these soldiers continued as successive French governments froze the war pensions of these indigenous veterans, and it was only after the film's release that the government policy was changed to bring foreign combatant pensions into line with what French veterans are paid. Though the film has been produced for a mainstream audience with many notable battle sequences, the cast is made up of recognisable Arab actors who have been successful in French cinema. This was a commercial gamble that has paid off and the film has become culturally influential in French politics, affecting a change in policy towards the treatment of war veterans after President Chirac personally intervened when he saw this film. This is a film which has been able to affect change within society, and it is exceptional for the revisionist approach it takes to a genre that has always been strongly associated with American cinema.
Days of Glory fully deserves the praise it has received for whilst superficial comparisons may be made to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” this is no apolitical movie descending into melodrama, rather it is a hard edged view of war and of racism. Like most Great War movies it shows not only the cruelty and savagery of battle but also the unfeeling indifference of the Army created to fight these wars. Here this indifference is magnified by the racism in the treatment of the native fighters from North Africa, a treatment echoed in America’s treatment of Black Soldiers who endured strict segregation and Britain’s of non-white colonial soldiers. The racism is shocking in its casualness, not just the overt racism in the different treatment, rations, promotion, denial of leave but even covertly censoring letters from North African soldiers to French girls to stop inter racial relationships. This shows the lie that Algerians were part of “Metropolitan France” and this fiction was cast asunder with some bitterness in 1959. Since then the treatment of the “pieds noirs” in France has been desultory and this film serves as a reminder of the root causes of these issues. But part of the French attitude may stem from an embarrassment that these North Africans who had never seen France were fighting to free it when many of its own citizens had chosen to collaborate.
Indeed the recent court case involving Gurkha Soldiers in Britain looking for equal pension and settlement rights echoes what has happened in France. They were championed by the actress Joanna Lumley who was born in Kashmir and spent her early life in Hong Kong and Malaysia. Her father served for 30 years with the 6th Gurkha Rifles, and was a Chindit in Burma; his admiration and affection for these soldiers of Nepal was shared by all who served with them. Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun VC, 87, fought alongside her father, Major James Rutherford Lumley, in Burma during the Second World War, and a picture of him was displayed in the family home. It is hard to understand the bravery he has displayed or read the official citation without emotion;
“War Office, 9th November, 1944
The KING has been graciously pleased to approve the award of the VICTORIA CROSS to:-
No. 10119 Rifleman Tulbahadur (sic) Pun, 6th Gurkha Rifles, Indian Army.In Burma on June 23, 1944, a Battalion of the 6th Gurkha Rifles was ordered to attack the Railway Bridge at Mogaung. Immediately the attack developed the enemy opened concentrated and sustained cross fire at close range from a position known as the Red House and from a strong bunker position two hundred yards to the left of it.
So intense was this cross fire that both the leading platoons of 'B' Company, one of which was Rifleman Tulbahadur (sic) Pun's, were pinned to the ground and the whole of his Section was wiped out with the exception of himself, the Section commander and one other man. The Section commander immediately led the remaining two men in a charge on the Red House but was at once badly wounded. Rifleman Tulbahadur (sic) Pun and his remaining companion continued the charge, but the latter too was immediately wounded.
Rifleman Tulbahadur (sic) Pun then seized the Bren Gun, and firing from the hip as he went, continued the charge on this heavily bunkered position alone, in the face of the most shattering concentration of automatic fire, directed straight at him. With the dawn coming up behind him, he presented a perfect target to the Japanese. He had to move for thirty yards over open ground, ankle deep in mud, through shell holes and over fallen trees.
Despite these overwhelming odds, he reached the Red House and closed with the Japanese occupants. He killed three and put five more to flight and captured two light machine guns and much ammunition. He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker to the remainder of his platoon which enabled them to reach their objective. His outstanding courage and superb gallantry in the face of odds which meant almost certain death were most inspiring to all ranks and beyond praise.”
Tul Bahadur Pun VC in 2007The Home Office barrister said that merely (sic) winning a Victoria Cross in battle was not sufficient connection with the UK to allow them to settle there. This attitude was condemned by Mr. Justice Blake as "Irrational, inconsistent, unlawful and lacking in clarity" – when he ruled against the UK Government on a law that barred Gurkha soldiers, who served the UK in the Falklands and the Gulf War, from settling in Britain. The campaign
(http://www.gurkhajustice.org.uk ) had indeed referred to Days of Glory and the Gurkha's used the French example to back their campaign asking for the same pension rights as other British soldiers.
Days of Glory is a complex and affecting movie that handles a thorny subject with sensitivity rather than militaristic bombast. The ending of the film is poignant and sums up what a impact "War" has on people and how the waste of life, affects them.
