Anyone who has experienced a European colonial past will resonate with this war film and its message.

It is an eye-opening and memory-jogging tale of how a colonial power took it for granted that it was superior to other peoples and that they could use them in patriotic defence of the motherland.  The focus here is on the Mediterranean countries of northern Africa but it is just as true of colonies in Africa, Indochina and British colonies everywhere.

Every reviewer will probably refer to its use of traditional war movies conventions – and it has, with films, especially, like Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One.  But that is merely a classification rather than a review.  Indigenes shows considerable skills in recreating the battles in Italy and France between 1943 and 1945.  This looks like a big-budget war film.  And it keeps the interest as such.

But the underlying theme is what is really important.  The film opens with recruiting in Algeria and Morocco, the French officers glad to have the men but snobbily regarding them as inferiors, incapable of leadership.  Throughout the film, there are sequences of disdain and humiliation of the Africans, the different treatment of the French nationals, seen as heroes, the taken-for-granted attitudes towards the men from imperialist France.  This is combined with what now seems extraordinary patriotism on the part of the Africans most of whom had never been to France before.

On their tombstones in Alsace, we read that they gave their lives for love of France. The plot follows, as war films so often do, a small group of men: the intelligent and well-read corporal who is overlooked in promotion, the sniper who falls in love with a Marseille girl, two brothers and an illiterate young man who is servant to their sergeant who keeps his North African origins hidden.  We follow them through Italy, Provence, the Vosges into Alsace, their comradeship, their tensions, their being put down yet their unswerving loyalty.

The postscript in 2005 when a survivor visits the cemetery and we are given information about the French government’s reluctance to honour pension promises, means that we leave the theatre moved and chastened.

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