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![]() days of glory interview
Director Rachid Bouchareb tells it like it was. Endless rows of gleaming white tombstones mark the lives lost defending a country’s freedom. Heartbreaking enough, but consider the tragedy if the deceased soldiers had been conscripted from an empire’s colonies, effectively to fight for an occupying power, then all but erased from their official history books. That any such survivors, once their homelands gained independence, were denied their rightful war pensions, is simply blatant institutionalized racism. Yet this was precisely the fate of African and North African soldiers who fought for France in WWII. This forgotten aspect of the Allied victory is the subject of Days Of Glory (Indigènes), an epic award-winning war film from French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb. “Charles De Gaulle used around 500,000 soldats indigènes,” recounts Bouchareb. “But at this time when you are African or North African, you are invisible in the world, in French history.” Oui to Jacques; non to Jamal. ![]() This disparity drove Bouchareb, himself the ancestor of immigrants who fought for France as far back as WWI, to spend many months researching, talking to around one hundred surviving veterans. Though the resulting characters in Indigènes are fictional, Bouchareb maintains, “My movie is only what these men told me. It is like the first documentary, because you have nothing about this time. I would like my movie to be like a document, is correct?” he asks, questioning his adept English, “for the library, the school. It can be like an archive.” It’s a bold claim for a dramatic feature, even one based closely on fact, but then Indigènes’ concrete impact on the world is almost unprecedented. After lobbying the French government for talks and a special screening, Bouchareb confronted President Chirac and his wife, still reeling from the film’s impact. ![]() He states matter-of-factly: “The president and his wife they receive a big impression - is correct? - and big emotion. When the movie finished I said, ‘Mr President, you see what these men do for France? You need now to do something.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I do.’” As a direct result of Indigènes, those African war veterans finally had their pensions reinstated. “The French occupied Algeria for 130 years,” says Bouchareb, switching to his native French tongue. “We have a colonial history in common, we have a communal history of liberating France, people died in dozens of thousands in the name of France. That changes everything.” Is correct.
Leigh Singer
Days Of Glory, on selected release 30 March 07.
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