Days of Glory
Starring: Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila
Director: Rachid Bouchareb
The film: Just like Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, Days of Glory is not the macho, testosterone- driven war epic that its flag-waving, triumphalist title suggests.
The film's original title, Indigenes, is a more faithful indication of director Rachid Bouchareb's intentions: the term refers to the men the Free French army recruited from France's African colonies to fight against Nazi Germany during the second world war, and the French-Algerian filmmaker is keen to portray the tribulations and anguish of these soldiers as they put their lives at risk to liberate a 'motherland' they've never been to and that treats them as second-class citizens.
Beginning with a recruitment drive in an Algerian village and ending in a shootout in a French one, the film is a tragic epic that follows its own 'band of brothers' through the deadly canyons in the Maghreb, to the slight respite of a liberated Marseilles, and to their return to deadly combat with the retreating Germans in the snow-covered French countryside.
