Has got to be the worst title ever chosen for a film.
But the film itself, called "Les Indigenes" (The Indigenous in french), is absolutely brilliant.
It's a French film about the Second World War, and the role that people from the colonies played in it. These people that weren't French, whose grand-parents had been killed by the French in colonial wars, and who had never even been to France. They made up half of the French army in 1944, roughly 300,000.
The film follows four young guys from North Africa that enlisted in the French army, for various reasons, and follows them during the invasion of South of France and Italy in 1944. These people, who were used as cannon-fodder, were not granted French citizenship. Not only that, but their role in the war was never recognised. Not only that, but when their country of origin got indepedence (1959), their war pensions were frozen (meaning the wages stoped following inflation), even if they lived in France.
In 1991, the Conseil d'Etat (our Supreme Court), ruled that this was illegal, and that the French government should pay these people exactly the same as "French" soldiers, and that the government should pay up everything it owed them, including the money they would've had had the pensions not been "frozen". And, of course, no government did it.
Until this film.
So, it's doubly "historic".
The film itself is amazing, and I won't spoil it by saying what happens. But if you have the faintest interest in WWII, in racism, in war, in immigration, or in the situation in the US today, where members of ethnic minorities form the the majority of the infantry, it is well worth seeing.
300, it ain't.
Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 12:56pm by RedPhoenixxx