Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film Days of Glory, or Indigènes in French, which came out in 2006. It was directed by Rachid Bouchareb and written by Rachid Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won several prizes at Cannes. The film depicts a fictional group of North African soldiers in the Free French forces fighting to liberate Europe during World War II. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje (00:42)
I thought it was alright. I’m excited we get to learn about yet another Forgotten Army this week. I liked that about it. I also liked seeing a thoughtful movie about colonial racism. But I also was a little bit bored. I don’t know. I think this movie — there are a lot of personal stakes for our characters, and it focuses a lot on what they go through in their war. It doesn’t do a very good job at setting the stakes for the war itself, so the battles kind of seemed a bit disjointed. And you need to know a lot about WWII to know where they fit into the scheme, because they didn’t really explain it. You just went from battle to battle. So, a bit of a hit or miss. Another interesting perspective, so I like those. It has that going for it. How about you?

Sam (01:46)
Yeah, I liked it with a few caveats. It won an award for the ensemble at Cannes, and I think you can see why. All the acting was pretty good. I would say my favourites were Abdelkader and Martinez. Obviously a super important story. The echoes of European colonialism still resound today and still impact global politics and affect the daily life of people who live in these various countries.

So it was really nice to see this story that I didn’t know very much about. I had known that there were African troops, and more broadly colonial troops, fighting in the Allied forces, but I didn’t know that much about it. I liked the battle scene in the village. I thought that was pretty well done. It’s fun to watch if you’re into that kind of thing, which you might be if you like watching war media. I did find I lacked a little bit of context as you were saying. I was kind of like, where is everybody? What is happening now? What is the passage of time supposed to be? And I think that ties into there being a bit of a lack of tension and urgency in some places in this movie. It falls a little flat. And I found when I got to the end of the movie, I was kind of like, wow, for a movie that did such a good job articulating the discrimination, both institutional and otherwise, that these men faced, it didn’t really wrap it up in a way that I thought made it particularly relevant to the events of today. I thought they were going to have an ending that had impact and meaning, and I didn’t really get that out of it. It became a little muddled at the end for me. But broadly I did enjoy it.

Maartje (03:20)
I wasn’t aware how recently some of the things that get mentioned at the end of the movie had been resolved. I didn’t realise just how long that kind of racism gets embedded within a country, within a French government and elsewhere. It was a good wake-up call for me to realise that I might think we’ve come really far as humans, but really, have we come far, or are we just really slow at doing the right thing?

Sam (03:56)
I think it’s truly wild how quite a lot of former empires still wear these colonialism goggles. I mean, we were talking offline a little bit about the British Museum situation earlier, and it’s just like, wow. There’s very much this sort of inbuilt imperial rot that has never quite gone away.

Maartje (04:16)
No. And I almost don’t understand how there’s so much… I don’t want to say pride, because I think generally people understand that it’s wrong. But there is a sense of pride about colonialism still. Even though they did terrible things to get it. And terrible things to the people who lived in their colonies. So, yeah, it’s weird to watch this and think, wait a second, this has not been that long. It’s only been like 15 years since the last bit has been resolved.

Sam (04:51)
Yeah, and I mean, it goes without saying probably at this point, because we’ve talked about this at length, but both of our countries have a very tangled relationship with imperialism as well.

Maartje (05:01)
Yes, very. The Dutch were notorious colonisers.

Sam (05:04)
Should we talk about the title?

Maartje (05:06)
Yes, let’s. Because in English it’s called Days of Glory, which is a pretty generic war movie title. But the French title, the original title, means — what does it mean in English?

Sam (05:19)
It means Natives.

Maartje (05:20)
Exactly. So as I was watching this, I was thinking, why did they choose Days of Glory? The Marseillaise does have a line in there about the days of glory, so I’m guessing that’s maybe why. But also maybe because they didn’t want to be offensive when they translated it for an international audience. I would have appreciated it if it had been a little bit more explanatory the way Natives would have been, because it immediately tells you that these people faced racism. And I think that’s honest. I don’t think that would have been offensive as a title. I think it would have been a good depiction of what we’re about to see in the movie.

Sam (06:09)
Yeah, Days of Glory felt very generic to me. I mean, I don’t know the words to the Marseillaise, so until you told me that, I didn’t know those were lyrics from that song. And I think the French version, Indigènes, works on two levels. On the one hand, it’s a vaguely offensive term for the colonial subjects of the French Empire. But I also think about the part of the movie where the character Saeed was talking about how, when he fights for a country, that’s his country. And some of the characters are so conflicted about how they feel about France as the motherland. So Indigènes — it’s like, will France ever consider these people to be native to France? I think it works on that level too. And then you just lose that double meaning in English.

Maartje (06:52)
Yeah, it could literally be any war movie if you pick Days of Glory. It also feels extremely American to me. I don’t know why.

Sam (07:00)
Yeah, I’ll agree with that.

Maartje (07:01)
Anyway, let’s get into the plot.

The movie opens in Algeria in 1943, where we see a representative of Free France leader Charles de Gaulle as he moves through villages and gathers men to fight for the liberation of the motherland of France. We meet our main character Saeed, played by Jamel Debbouze, and he enlists despite his mother’s wishes. He says he wants to help France, so he’s all for it at this point.

Sam (07:45)
Colonial troops in the Free French Army consisted of North African units, as we see in the film. These are men from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. But it also consisted of men from Sub-Saharan Africa. They called the men from central and West Africa the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, which basically means the Senegalese soldiers, even though they were of course not all Senegalese.

The first colonial army that France raised was from Senegal in 1857, so the name just kind of stuck. All of their African soldiers became known as the Senegalese soldiers. Those who were not lured in by promises or rewards, including enlistment bonuses and tax exemption, were outright coerced into joining the Free French forces after the fall of France in 1940.

So most of the men that we see in this movie join voluntarily, but that was definitely not the case for everybody. Obviously there were a lot of really complex attitudes towards their colonial oppressors and being asked to fight for them. But from the French perspective, raising colonial armies was viewed as a necessity. In 1940, when the Germans took over France, 1.4 million French soldiers had been captured. The French army had effectively imploded, and there were no other options for France if they wanted to continue to be a viable power on the Allied side and potentially emerge as a post-war power. So that’s why they were doing so much work to drum up these colonial armies.

In fact, in 1940, when those 1.4 million French soldiers were captured, 120,000 colonial troops had fought in this part of the war defending France. And when they got captured by the Germans, they did not get treated the way white soldiers got treated. In one case in particular, we know there was a massacre. There were instances of Black soldiers simply disappearing on the way to POW camps. Disgraceful, obviously.

Africa was such a central part of France’s war effort in WWII. There is an article I read on warhistory.org that said Charles de Gaulle’s first territorial base was Chad in French Central Africa, which rallied to him officially in August of 1940. Henceforth, African soldiers from Central Africa complemented the nucleus of French forces that had fled to Britain in the wake of the defeat of 1940. And so we’ve talked about this a little bit before — this city called Brazzaville in Congo served as a sort of capital and strategic hub of Free France in the early part of the war, like 1940 to 1943, as the Free French struggled to retake Allied colonial holdings from the Axis powers. Ultimately, two thirds of the French Liberation Army were African. This represented hundreds of thousands of men, and their story went largely untold for decades.

And I think this quote from Jacques Soustelle, a French politician and anthropologist, sums it up. He said: “With what rage anti-Gaullists of both the left and the right, the communists and the Vichyites, relentlessly propagate the myth of a London resistance. To both sides I counter with the truth, Free France was African.”

Maartje (11:01)
That’s a pretty powerful statement, and I don’t think it’s wrong. We talked about it in our Casablanca episode, I think — go listen to that if you want to hear more. I also think we can link to our friend Pierre.

Sam (11:36)
Who fought on the side of the colonial in the Algerian War.

Maartje (11:40)
Well, yes. But at least it’s a French movie. That’s the kind of connection I was talking about.

Sam (11:46)
It sure is.

Maartje (11:47)
Although, to be fair, for this one I at least had subtitles.

Sam (11:51)
For as much as this is a French movie, a good chunk of it is in Arabic.

Maartje (11:54)
Fair, that’s very true. Which I do not speak. I can understand some French, but none of the Arabic. So thank God for subtitles. We move to Morocco in 1943, where we meet two Berber brothers, Yassir, played by Sami Naceri, and Larbi, played by Assad Bouab. They’re a little dubious about enlisting, but Larbi reminds his brother that they’re in it for the money. Which is going to bite him in the ass.

Sam (12:20)
Yeah. Yes, they’re trying to make money so Yassir can get married, which I thought was sort of cute. It’s very much like an older brother-younger brother relationship.

Next we move on to Setif in Algeria in 1943. The men begin to train, and we hear Le Chant des Africains for the first time. Le Chant des Africains is a French military song, and these days it’s considered a sort of anthem for the Pied Noir community. The Pied Noir community is people of French ancestry who were born in French colonies, typically of European descent but born in Africa.

The lyrics were modified in 1943 to include soldiers from French colonies who did not have French ancestry, so that’s why we see a lot of these colonial soldiers singing it. And the lyrics include: “Strike the drum to our loves, for the country, for the fatherland, to die far away, we are the Africans.”

Maartje (13:14)
Yeah. Does Pied Noir mean Blackfoot?

Sam (13:17)
Yeah.

Maartje (13:18)
That’s kind of racist. Almost.

Sam (13:20)
Yeah.

Maartje (13:21)
There’s no way around some things. They’re just called what they’re called. But it does feel a bit weird.

Sam (13:29)
Yeah, a little iffy.

Maartje (13:31)
I did like that they included this song. There’s not a whole lot of music in this film. Part of it’s Arabic music, and the rest I can’t remember, so at least I remembered this.

Sam (13:44)
Yeah. And the fact that this is a song repurposed and refashioned to fit this idea of these men from the colonies wanting to fight for the motherland — and we hear that quite often during the movie, these white European Frenchmen saying to the colonial troops, we’re going to fight for the motherland, and this is a country most of these men have never even been to. So I think this song really did a good job of underpinning that message.

Maartje (14:11)
Yes. So the next thing we see — they do a clever thing, by the way. Every time we move to a new location or a new time, they show you the land from above in black and white, and then it fades, almost like the sun is rising, into colour. It’s quite clever to show you we’re in a different location. And we end up in Italy in 1944 with the troops. They are still extremely green.

This is when we meet Sergeant Roger Martinez, played by Bernard Blancan, and he’s notably white. Or so we think. He’s pretty indicative of how the French forces are structured. Basically, white leadership over people of colour.

We also meet Corporal Abdelkader, played by Sami Bouajila, who believes that wartime service in the North African troops will earn them equal treatment by the French. He’s very hopeful throughout this entire movie, until the very end. I liked that about him. At least someone is hopeful. Everybody else is kind of cynical.

And there’s another one of our ensemble cast, Messaoud Souni, played by Roschdy Zem, who becomes the unit’s sharpshooter. He’s basically a badass, and he dreams of one day living in France.

Sam (15:39)
I thought it was quite nice to get this diverse mix of motivations. And I also really liked Corporal Abdelkader. He was probably my favourite. One of my favourite parts was a scene a little later in the movie, because this whole time he has this tug of war within himself where he really wants to believe that they are going to be rewarded by the French and earn being treated as equals. And I think a part of him knows that’s not going to happen. But if it doesn’t happen, then what was this all for? So he kind of has to believe it will. And there’s a part in the woods where a whole bunch of things have gone sideways, and you can just see in his face that he’s starting to figure out that maybe all this is not going to be worth it. And the actor does such a great job with it. It was really cool to watch this extremely conflicted character as he moves through this situation.

Maartje (16:28)
He reminded me in a way of Sodi in The Forgotten Army, because he similarly has to grapple with the idea of loyalty and what is in his future, what he is fighting for. I like the similarities between them. I think that must be why I like this character so much.

Sam (16:48)
Yeah, definitely could be.

The North African troops are sent up a hill to flush out a German position. There’s an immediate sense that they’re being used as cannon fodder. You can tell that the French have set them up there so that the Germans will shoot at the North Africans, and then the French can zero in on the German positions and hit them with artillery. So they’re practically getting shelled by their own side. Martinez saves Saeed’s life, which makes an enduring impression on Saeed, and we’ll see that as the film goes on. A colonel cheerfully refers to this as the first battle France has won against the Germans since 1940. And you just notice that he’s happy to refer to the North Africans as French when it suits.

Maartje (17:34)
Yeah, it’s like, as long as they’re winning, I’m going to treat them like they’re French. The second we’re not in battle anymore, I’m just going to be a dick about it.

Sam (17:43)
Right, yeah. And we’ll see echoes of this later when it comes to who gets to take credit for victory.

Maartje (17:52)
Yes, exactly. Well, after that battle in Italy, they move to Provence in August 1944. And this is another nice example of the Algerians being treated much more poorly than the white soldiers, because the white soldiers get tomatoes and the people of colour do not. A fight almost breaks out. This scene was pretty tense, one of the more tense scenes of the movie.

Sam (18:27)
Basically these North African guys are moving along a lunch line and they’re able to take tomatoes, but you can tell the guy is side-eyeing them. And then a Black soldier shows up, and that’s just too much for this white guy. He’s like, no, you can’t have a tomato. And the situation snowballs until, I believe, Abdelkader throws the basket of tomatoes on the floor and stomps on them. He’s like, there, now nobody gets tomatoes.

Maartje (18:56)
Yeah. I was a little confused about whether Martinez was impressed by this or annoyed, or both.

Sam (19:10)
Yeah, and there’s a little scene where Martinez is talking to one of the higher-ups, explaining the situation. He says something like, they’re willing to die for us, but one small injustice and they’ll mutiny. And the other guy keeps referring to the North African troops as Muslims, or something else. And Martinez says, sir, we just call them the men. So there are parts of the movie where Martinez is very much on their side and believes in these men. But he’s also wrestling with this internalised xenophobia, this colonial mindset he can’t quite shake. And then, as we’ll find out later, he is half Arab but white-passing, and he doesn’t want anyone to know. So I think part of the reason he holds back on giving them his full support is because he’s worried that if he looks too Arab-friendly, people will start questioning his background.

Maartje (20:11)
Yeah, maybe also just grappling with his own identity. I wonder if he’s relating to these people more than he thought he would. But I don’t know, I wonder what was written in the script or what the director had instructed this actor to do. Because it’s interesting, it’s a back and forth.

Sam (20:38)
Yeah, he’s full of so much great conflict too. I really enjoyed his character.

Maartje (20:44)
He’s not very pleasant to them one second, and then behind their backs he does something for them. Which we would call a stoplight in the Netherlands because they always go from green to red. But I don’t think that’s a saying in English, so I’ll ignore that.

Sam (21:04)
No, we have yellow lights.

Maartje (21:08)
Yeah, that’s weird. Ours are orange. We’re just, you know, on brand.

After the men have participated in Operation Dragoon and begin freeing France from the south, the citizens of Marseille are happy to see them. Messaoud meets a woman named Irene. She’s French, played by Aurélie Elbaz. And they promise to write to one another. There are some pleasant moments together, and Irene doesn’t mind that he’s Arab, but everyone around her is looking at her like, what are you doing? So racism is real.

Sam (21:41)
Yeah. A little bit about Operation Dragoon: obviously this is August of 1944. The Allies had landed in Normandy in June, and then they realised they couldn’t effectively supply their army with just that one landing. They needed another way to get supplies onto the continent. So Operation Dragoon came about, and that’s how a lot of these troops ended up liberating cities and towns in the south of France.

Maartje (22:15)
Supply lines, baby. It’s always about supply lines.

Sam (22:19)
Right. An army marches on its belly.

The Rhone Valley, October 1944. Saeed has become Martinez’s orderly. As we mentioned, he attached himself to Martinez after Martinez saved his life in the initial battle. The other soldiers mock him a little bit. Saeed is not educated and can’t read or write. I think part of him really looks up to Martinez.

Martinez, meanwhile, gets promoted to Staff Sergeant, which the North African soldiers very much notice, because none of them ever get promoted. There’s a little scene where Martinez goes to the higher-ups and says, look, my guys would have been promoted multiple times by now if they were white European soldiers. The higher-up offers Martinez a promotion. And he says, that’s not what I was asking. I don’t want a promotion. I want my guys to get the promotions they deserve. So this is another example of him in the background trying to get justice for his men, working inside a system that is profoundly unjust.

Saeed soon discovers, as we mentioned, that Martinez has an Arab mother, but Martinez threatens to kill him if he spreads it around. This is a very big deal.

Maartje (23:35)
Yeah. You find the photo of his mother and him as a baby in his shirt while doing his laundry. And then Martinez says, so you went through my stuff. And he gets very upset. But obviously he’s upset to have been found out to be not entirely white. It made me sad. I just wanted it to be a good relationship, to be honest.

Sam (24:00)
Yeah, definitely a bummer. Obviously his whole life, he’s benefited from being white-passing, and he knows full well that if they knew he was half Arab, his prospects would be much different.

Maartje (24:16)
Yes.

Sam (24:17)
We should mention here too that colonial soldiers often had the cast-offs in terms of equipment and uniforms, and we see this where the men are in winter and still wearing sandals. They don’t have boots yet.

Maartje (24:31)
And it’s snowing.

Sam (24:32)
It’s brutal, man.

Maartje (24:37)
I think it’s one of the brothers, right? It’s Larbi who has frozen feet, and his brother is trying to warm them up.

Sam (24:44)
At one point they find out they’re coming off the line and they’re all excited because they think they’re going on leave. But what’s really happening is that after several weeks of freezing their asses off, they’re finally getting assigned jackets and boots.

Maartje (24:54)
Yeah, it’s like, small mercies, I guess.

So while they do get off the line, their white compatriots have been given leave. They get denied leave, so they cannot go home and see their families. They’re just stuck there. To pass the time, the French army puts on a ballet for them, and they hate it and walk out. And the white soldiers are like, why are these people walking out?

Sam (25:20)
Can I just say, nowhere but the French army would a ballet performance be put on for soldiers.

Maartje (25:27)
It’s like Swan Lake or something. This really dramatic, very intensely French ballet.

Sam (25:35)
Yeah.

Maartje (25:36)
At this point, Abdelkader gathers his men and tells them it’s time for them to get a little bit of liberty, equality, and fraternity for themselves. Martinez sees this and gets very upset. There’s a fight, so Abdelkader gets thrown into the brig. And Messaoud also gets thrown into the brig because he made a break for it and tried to go visit Irene. He has not heard from her at all. He’s like, why is she not replying to any of my letters? And we’ll soon find out.

Sam (26:05)
In the Vosges, November 1944, it turns out Messaoud’s letters to Irene are being censored. The letters come through and they’ll either have a picture of him, or someone reads his Arabic last name, and they’re like, we can’t be promoting this interracial relationship. So his letters aren’t getting through to her, and her letters aren’t getting through to him. And they’re both quite upset about this.

Maartje (26:28)
Aww, yeah. I thought it was so sad. She even goes to the army post office and says, I haven’t heard from him, is he dead? It made me so sad.

Sam (26:39)
Yeah, it was a huge bummer. Even though they only had a brief time together, I was really rooting for them.

Maartje (26:44)
Me too.

Sam (26:45)
Yeah, so Abdelkader, kind of the leader of the men, is in the brig. Messaoud, their sharpshooter, is also in the brig. This is not really ideal for the French because they need these two. So the colonel gives Abdelkader a special mission to reinforce and bring ammunition to American troops fighting in the Lorraine campaign, rather than making an example of him. I think he realises that if he does that, the other troops might riot. And also, this is a guy who’s really good at his job. Once again, the colonial troops are made empty promises about how they’ll be recompensed after the war is over.

Maartje (27:27)
Yes. At this point in the movie I was like, I’m just getting really depressed. Can we get some good news please? But no, because a German booby trap kills their captain and his second in command. Martinez is also wounded. So Abdelkader is put in charge. He’s not really feeling it, but that’s just how it is. Larbi, one of the brothers, has died tragically in the same chaos. Yassir and the others don’t really want to go on. But Abdelkader, hopeful as he is, persuades them. They want to be the first French soldiers in Alsace. It’s a point of honour for them. And he just wants to do it, even though his doubt is showing. He’s like, if we go on, will this mean change for us, or will it just be another disappointment?

Sam (28:30)
Yeah. He’s shouting at them, look, we have to do this. If we do this, they’ll have to recognise us as equals. And you know that he’s not going to get what he deserves. It’s a little shattering.

Maartje (28:46)
He’s also a fantastic leader, so you just want him to succeed. And because he’s so hopeful, you want him to succeed even more.

Sam (28:54)
Sure.

They reach an eerily quiet village where the villagers feed them and help Martinez. He’s got some kind of head wound and can’t really get up and move around. So Abdelkader remains in charge for now. They’re separated from the rest of their unit, just this small group of them. And they vow to hold the village until reinforcements arrive.

We also see Mélanie Laurent, who played Shoshana in Inglourious Basterds. She makes a brief appearance as a French farmer that Saeed has a little moment with.

Maartje (29:34)
For the life of me I couldn’t remember who this actress was. Thank you so much for reminding me.

Sam (29:40)
She has such a distinctive face. I was just like, that’s the one from Inglourious Basterds.

Maartje (29:46)
Yeah, I knew I’d seen her before, I just couldn’t place her. So you’ve now quieted my distraught mind over this actress.

Sam (29:57)
Yeah, I bet you were really tossing and turning about it.

Maartje (30:00)
It’s January 15th, 1945. Still winter and still awful. The men are even saying, how do the Europeans do this, living in the cold all the time? They’re not having a good time. At this point we’re nearing the end of the Battle of the Bulge, which we know, but you wouldn’t know from watching this film. There’s a pocket of German resistance in Alsace still. The Germans turn up in force in the village, and there aren’t many of our guys left. It’s a pretty valiant effort, but they’re greatly outnumbered and outgunned. Although they are very good marksmen.

Sam (30:43)
Oh my goodness, Saeed is shooting guys with a pistol and he’s just ice cold. And — wait, you should tell the people why he’s shooting with a pistol.

Maartje (30:55)
So, I watched this movie and immediately noticed something about the actor playing Saeed. I asked Sam when she was about 30 minutes in, have you noticed that this actor has not moved his arm once? Like, one arm is just stuffed into the pocket of his shirt the entire time. Turns out this actor has a paralysed arm, or at least a damaged arm. He cannot use this arm, so the entire movie, even though he’s carrying a big rifle and loads of other things, his arm doesn’t work. And it’s just stuck in his shirt. I immediately noticed it, I think because I have a dysfunctional arm myself. I just zeroed in. I was like, this is so distracting.

They never mention it once in this entire movie. Part of me wishes they’d made it part of the storyline. But on the other hand, it’s nice to see an actor with a disability just playing a part where the disability is not the storyline. He happens to be an actor with a disability and he gets to play a soldier. That’s probably why he’s shooting a pistol at the end.

Sam (32:15)
You guys, once you told me, I could not unsee it. There’s a part where Martinez is mad at Saeed and flings him out of this building, takes him right off his feet. And at no point does Saeed take his arm out of his pocket. And I was like, okay, yeah, I see it now.

Maartje (32:18)
I’m so relaxed.

And I noticed this in scene one, when we’re still in Algeria. The first three minutes, I was like, wait, his arm is not moving, what’s going on?

But yeah, in this final scene between the Germans and our guys, our sweetheart Messaoud, the sharpshooter, he’s the first one to die. He gets bazooka’d out of a building, then shot.

Sam (32:56)
Our North African troops are running around with rifles and a pistol, and the Germans show up with all the gear.

Maartje (33:02)
At first they manage to take them by surprise a little bit, and then the Germans come back in full force and you’re like, no! You even think they might survive, but then there’s a second wave of Germans and you’re like, no!

Sam (33:17)
I’m also like, do you guys have so much ammunition that you can afford to kill one guy with a bazooka round? I feel like you usually use those for tanks, maybe a group of soldiers. But they’re like, no, I’m going to shoot this one guy with this bazooka.

Maartje (33:32)
Yeah. At this point, Saeed dies. I was like, wait, these are kind of main characters that we follow the entire time. He’s trying to drag Martinez out of there to get him to safety, even though Martinez was kind of shitty to them. But then they both get bazooka’d through a wall.

Sam (34:00)
Yes, they sure do.

Maartje (34:03)
Yeah. And then Yassir gets killed. So eventually there’s only our favourite character left from this entire group, and it was so sad.

Sam (34:23)
Yeah. And you can tell he’s just gutted. He’s making his last stand and all of the men he’s so close with have died. And then I’m like, where are the reinforcements? And they turn up just as everyone is dead except for Abdelkader. So he survives, the lone survivor.

Immediately it’s clear that the white French troops will be taking credit for the victory, though the villagers recognise who the real heroes are. Abdelkader is walking along and sees a photographer taking a picture of all these European French troops with the villagers, being like, yes, victory. And obviously he’s not being included. Pretty much immediately he gets assigned to another unit. It’s almost like the efforts of his men are not even being acknowledged.

But as he’s leaving the village, several of the villagers clap for him, which I thought was quite poignant.

Maartje (35:16)
The slow clap. I was like, my god. But it’s going to be so meaningless, because all his men are dead. All the people he cared about are dead.

Sam (35:26)
Right. And when he gets immediately reassigned to another unit and no one’s even really acknowledging him or his men, that’s when it starts to sink in for him that things are not going to change meaningfully as a result of all this.

Maartje (35:38)
No. My god. I was just so done with this movie at this point. I was like, I don’t like it anymore, everybody’s dead. Except for Abdelkader. I do wonder why they decided to open this movie with Saeed and have us follow him basically the entire time, even more than Abdelkader, and then only have Abdelkader at the finish line.

Sam (35:47)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think Saeed’s relationship with Martinez is really important, so the fact that they die together is kind of symbolic.

Maartje (36:05)
And his arm is still stuffed into his shirt as they’re lying dead on the floor.

Sam (36:13)
Yeah, never takes that hand out of his pocket.

In 1944 and 1945, there was something they called the Blanchiment, or whitening, of French troops. African troops who had been on the front line this whole time were replaced by European troops as they became available during the liberation of France. Obviously a lot of French soldiers who had been captured in 1940 were being liberated, and members of the French Resistance could now take on military duty.

Several reasons were given for the Blanchiment, including the official reason that African troops didn’t do as well in the cold. This was actually a longstanding policy with the French colonial army. But the real reason was that the Allies honestly thought European French people would be demoralised by being freed by colonial troops. For so long they had been the ones in charge. So to have been liberated by these troops, they thought that European French people wouldn’t appreciate that. They wanted European French soldiers to be the ones photographed, the ones French citizens saw as they were being liberated.

There’s a specific instance where an Algerian regiment was supposed to be part of the liberation of Paris. But at the last minute, those troops were taken out and a French unit was put in so that these North African troops wouldn’t be photographed liberating Paris. And it was difficult for them to rustle up a whole regiment of European French troops, because by that point most units were at least 40% North African or from Africa anyway. So they went through all this trouble. And actually this whole Blanchiment thing had a negative impact militarily, because they were bringing in all these guys with very little combat experience, while the African troops by now had significant experience. So when you take them out and put in inexperienced guys, it’s actually not even a good idea strategically.

Maartje (38:51)
No. And then you’re at the end of the war and all your soldiers don’t know how to fight — good luck if anything else happens. It’s kind of interesting though that that scene at the very end is kind of a reflection of the wider Blanchiment. It makes me just so angry. It’s like, we’ll just kick them out the second there’s no more fighting to be done, when there’s glory to be gained, we’ll just put the right people back in. It’s so gross.

Sam (39:19)
Yeah.

Maartje (39:22)
Sixteen years later, we see an aged Abdelkader as he walks among the gravestones in the Alsace War Cemetery. He’s looking at the graves of his friends who fell there. End cards tell us that in 1959, the French government passed a law freezing the pensions of North African veterans from colonies that were about to become independent. In 2002, after endless hearings, the government was ordered to pay the pensions in full, but successive governments did not do so at the time this film was made. That’s what I was talking about when we started this episode, about how recently some things still hadn’t been fixed.

Sam (40:05)
Yeah. Just think about the fact that for about 40 years, North African veterans were getting pensions equivalent to 1959 values. So obviously they’re not going up with inflation. It’s not a meaningful amount of money by 2002. And meanwhile, the men who fought alongside them are getting full pensions. Just disgraceful.

Maartje (40:32)
Yeah. It left me feeling sort of disappointed with the movie, but it’s nothing to do with the movie. It’s just the fact that it’s so sombre at the end. I just feel so sad about it.

Sam (40:48)
Yeah, but there’s a slight silver lining. The release of this film was actually instrumental in bringing this situation to light for a lot of people. And in 2010, the government brought foreign combatant pensions in line with what French veterans were paid. Though notably, I believe they did not receive arrears. They didn’t get reimbursed for the difference they should have received all those years. But they did begin to get proper pensions in 2010, which is crazy, because obviously many of these guys are dead at that point.

Maartje (41:19)
Was about to say, are any of them still alive at this point?

Sam (41:23)
Right. And even then, when they made this change, French military pension rules required veterans to spend at least six months a year living in France to remain eligible for their pensions. Obviously a lot of the survivors had gone back to North Africa. This was not really workable. This rule was only suspended after the release of yet another film, Tirailleurs, in 2023. So these two movies essentially shamed the French government into behaving properly.

Maartje (41:48)
And that’s what I like about this film. The power of a film, sometimes we kind of underestimate it. Which is why it’s good it was made. Even though I think it could have been so much better. I didn’t hate it. I just also don’t think I’ll watch it again. Yeah.

Sam (42:05)
Yeah. I’ll also say that final scene, even though it’s personally meaningful for this main character, I don’t feel like it said something in the way I was hoping it would. The end cards are kind of slapped on there, so we do get a little bit of closure in terms of all this racism and discrimination these guys faced. But the final scene didn’t really do it for me.

Maartje (42:19)
Yeah, no, I agree. I would have liked to see what Abdelkader got up to after the war. A little bit maybe with family, or something. Whether or not he stayed with the military, probably not, but you know. I would have liked to have seen him in between that and old age. Maybe that would have been better.

Sam (42:49)
Yeah. He just kind of, after his little walk through the cemetery, goes back to this little dark, quiet, sad apartment by himself. And he’s just sitting there, and you obviously get the sense that he’s feeling this personal loss and is aware that these soldiers did not get meaningfully recognised in the way he was hoping. But it just didn’t go big enough on that message.

Maartje (43:15)
No. I almost would have liked it if he’d shown a flicker of hope at the very end. Because that’s really who he was in the movie. It would have been nice if they hadn’t taken that from him by giving him a sad ending.

Sam (43:28)
Yeah. And if they’d tied it in a little more with current events. There have been riots in the past few years with North African people in France. This is still quite a hot political topic. I think I would have liked to see a bit more of a tie-in with that.

Maartje (43:47)
Me too. And that’s very sappy of me, I’m aware, but maybe a grandson or something. Someone who represents the hope he had, or at least had at one point. Just a tiny fleck of hope at the very end. Because if we don’t have any hope, then where are we going?

Sam (44:04)
Yeah, fair enough.

Maartje (44:05)
Yeah. But all in all, another interesting movie from yet another untold perspective. So we’re doing really well with the untold perspective recently.

Sam (44:12)
Yes, yes. I’ve been enjoying finding out about areas of WWII that I didn’t know much about, that I hadn’t really touched on.

Maartje (44:24)
No, me too. And you have some notes to give us a bit more of that.

Sam (44:37)
Towards the end of the war, a lot of French troops were liberated from POW camps where they had been since 1940. This included a number of African troops who had been captured defending France at that time. Like many colonial troops, they were sent to repatriation camps until the government could deal with them. There were often long delays in getting them home, and they were not treated well.

Near the Senegalese capital, African troops were being kept in a camp until they could be sent home. They protested the conditions of the camp, which were worse than the German POW camps, and unpaid demobilisation benefits. They were supposed to be getting paid these wages but were not. On December 1st, 1944, French troops opened fire on them. They were unarmed.

French colonial authorities at the time admitted to 35 deaths, but more recent reporting suggests up to 400. Many were buried in a mass grave. There is a small cemetery in Senegal where some of them are buried, but a lot of them we don’t know where they ended up. The incident was suppressed for years in both France and Senegal. Senegalese governments after the war had this thing where they were trying to maintain ties with France because they thought they could more effectively lobby for justice and reparations if they kept on good terms with the French government. So they didn’t really want people talking about this.

Maartje (46:06)
Again, so depressing. Why must people be so horrible to other people?

Sam (46:11)
Yeah. When you think about the fact that these guys were out here laying down their lives for France, and then the second the war was over, it was like, we’re going to go back to treating them like subhumans again.

Maartje (46:20)
Just a big fuck you from the French.

Sam (46:23)
And as we discussed recently in our episode about the Indian National Army, WWII stoked independence movements across the empires of not just France but also Great Britain, particularly in Africa. These colonial troops made significant contributions to the Allied victory. And there was a sense that veterans had seen that their French oppressors bled red too. The facade of colonial hierarchy was irreparably cracked. There was no going back to the relationship of oppressor and oppressed that had existed before. The meagre efforts of colonial powers to assuage the increasingly disillusioned and angry African populace after the war simply didn’t cut it. They were not providing these people with any meaningful acknowledgement of the effort they had put in.

And coupled with the fact that Britain and France could not really afford to maintain their former empires after the war, this really stoked these independence movements. Algeria won independence after the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. Morocco was independent in 1956. Senegal became independent in 1960. More than 50 African nations gained their independence in the 30 or so years after the end of WWII, and it was really a direct result in many cases of the contributions they had made to the colonial armies.

Maartje (47:46)
I also think people don’t necessarily realise how much war bankrolls a country, so that’s also why they could not upkeep these colonial holdings. Which is good for the people who live there, so they could finally become independent.

Sam (48:02)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje (48:03)
We have to rate this movie, but before we do, I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Please follow us. I keep a close eye on it, so please do. And you can also send this episode to a friend.

Sam (48:17)
When we talked about the Indian National Army, we said every time you send this episode to a friend, another group gets their independence from the British. Well, this time it’s going to be every time you send this episode to a friend, someone else gets their independence from France.

Maartje (48:28)
Great. I think we should all be liberated from France, to be honest.

Sam (48:32)
Ha.

Maartje (48:34)
I’m sorry, I have some feelings sometimes about the French.

Do help someone gain their independence from France, please. And now we have come to the rating part of this podcast.

How many hands in pockets out of 10 would you rate this movie, Sam?

Sam (48:49)
I’m going to give it seven Hands in Pockets out of ten. I think it’s a well-made movie. I think the acting is really good. It deserved the awards it won at Cannes. As I said, I don’t think they really drove the message home on the level I was hoping for. But if you want to find out more about these guys, this is a great place to start. And I am really enjoying that we’re talking so much about the impacts that WWII has had on the subsequent 80 years. That’s a huge thing I’ve learned from this podcast, the way everything sort of fits together, and the way you can see very directly how our current world is tied back to so many of these things that happened. So that’s always super fascinating to me. What about you?

Maartje (49:30)
I would rate this movie 6.7 Hands in Pockets out of 10. It wasn’t my favourite. I did think the story was interesting. I just think the way it was told could have been a little bit more balanced between the personal struggles and motivations and the war part of it, which I thought wasn’t too exciting.

Again, as you’ve already said, it’s an interesting corner of WWII, which kind of immediately gives it an extra point for me. Yeah, I can’t really go higher than 6.7. I’m just not going to watch it again, I think. But, you know, learn something new. Every day is a school day with Rosie. Yay! Maybe that should be our next series, where we teach children about WWII.

Sam (50:23)
I think we can pull it off. I used to be a teacher.

Maartje (50:24)
Exactly. You have the skills. I don’t have the skills, but I can learn the skills.

Sam (50:29)
That’s right.

Maartje (50:38)
Anyway, are you reading anything?

Sam (50:40)
I just finished a book last night. It’s called Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It’s the first book of a science fiction duology that’s quite well known. It took me a little while to get into it, but it was one of those ones where as I went through and I sort of picked up what the author was putting down, I got more into it.

Maartje (51:10)
Interesting. I don’t have any new books to mention, just the Dutch book I’m reading for book club, which is of no interest to anyone listening to this podcast. So ignore me. And I would like to thank you for listening to yet another episode of Rosie the Reviewer. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us on Instagram at @rosiethereviewerpodcast, or you can visit our website at rosiethereviewer.com for more information. And we’ll see you next week. Bye!

Sam (51:40)
Bye.