Tweet

This immensely powerful combat drama is, like all great war films, as much about politics and injustice as it is about excitement and explosions. Indigènes (meaning ‘natives’) tells the story of a ‘Band of (Muslim) Brothers’, North African Arabs drafted as infantry to help end the Nazi tyranny. In telling of the cruel discrimination these ‘colonial subjects’ suffered, the director references agit-prop classics of the past– the onboard mutiny over tomatoes is pure Battleship Potemkin while traces of the great Battle of Algiers, a previous attempt at documenting those Frantz Fanon called ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ are even harder to ignore. Indigènes is marked by beautiful symbolism: aerial shots of landscapes swathed in shadows that slowly clear; a farm where the final action occurs is a freezing place of death. A colonel tells the unit “All of France will watch and remember you” yet for years French governments froze the pensions of these men, a disgrace only reversed when Indigènes was screened in France and only acknowledged on this DVD cut of the film.

 

Mark Goodall on 5th September 2007
View all 5 of Mark Goodall's reviews