The Past Makes Us Think About Today, and About Tomorrow

Interview with Rachid Bouchareb regarding Indigènes/Days of Glory

With Olivier Barlet at Cannes, May 2006, for Africultures

Translated by Michael Dembrow

What led you to become interested in this piece of history?

The story of this film is our parents’ story; it concerns thousands, millions of people. It’s really this aspect of our memory that interested me. But it was also to reveal this chapter in French history which is not understood in France, nor is it known in the countries of North Africa or Africa.

It’s a very contemporary subject with the debate occurring around the February 2005 [French] law which demanded that the “positive aspects” of colonization be highlighted, but I imagine that you had begun to work on the film well before that. We see a terrible lack of understanding of these events by the population as a whole.

Yes, absolutely. I launched this film four years ago, and today we’ve arrived at the crossroads of this debate over colonization, with the frictions that exist today between France and her former colonies, this debate over the proper history of French colonialism, a history from which French society is trying to find an exit, seeking to jettison once and for all its colonial past, to definitively leave the debate behind.

One of the four characters, the only one to survive, finds himself at 60 an immigrant in a small room. We have the feeling that he has somehow been trapped by the ideology that he fought to protect.

Yes, that is still the situation for hundreds of men in France, who are in shelters in Bordeaux, Nantes, Paris, Mulhouse. There are some everywhere in France and many in Africa who at age 90 are still waiting for recognition. Some were with me [at the Cannes screening] yesterday evening, and they were very moved. They wept, and the most astonishing thing is that they continued to say that despite everything, if they had it to do all over again, they would have acted in the same way. Because they experienced a tremendous human encounter with the French people when they arrived here. They were wonderfully welcomed, they shared food with the French, they slept beside them, they married French women. For them, it was an incredible moment. And despite the fact that they still await the recognition that would come in the form of reparation and pensions, they still were able to weep with emotion.

Among the four principal actors, did any of them have a personal connection with the history that you describe?

They all did. That’s what brought us together, this same history, that of our parents’ immigration story, in the family memories that in any case aren’t all that clear in this respect. Also, each one of us has a great-grandfather who died in World War I, and some of us had relatives, like my uncle, who died in Indochina. We’ve always been intimately tied to the history of France, integrated into the history of France; that’s why it was important for us to say, “Let’s shed light on our own chapter that lies at the heart of French history.” This chapter, which belongs to the history of France, let’s tell it from our own perspective.

How did you work with each of them? Was the work done mainly in advance or in the immediacy of shooting?

We worked continually with the actors by talking about the story every day, aside from questions of filming. We were beyond cinema—the filming was just a means to an end. Our discussion was as follows: we’re making this film, we’re also learning things as a result of the process of shooting and the encounters that we’re having. All over France, people would come to see us—not to see a film being shot—but to talk about History. And yesterday evening, when we arrived here with the infantrymen and walked up those steps, it wasn’t to present a film, but to present a chapter in French history. In that way we were putting ourselves totally—emotionally and intellectually—outside the awards competition. I didn’t come here to win a prize; our prize was the men who were here with us yesterday, those men who had fought in the war, who had fought all along this coast.

Can one make a parallel between Abdelkader, who in the film leads the men to combat, and you, who put together a cinematic commando team to liberate History? At the press conference you said that you had not done the work of a historian. Yet you did make choices, notably the choice to leave out an important event that occurred several days after VE (Liberation) Day, May 8, 1945. Why this choice?

The choice was a function of writing the script. It was a choice to not let myself be totally engulfed by the details of history, however important and however much they’ve affected Algerian memory. I first wrote a screenplay that finished with Sétif [the terrible massacres in Algeria that occurred soon after the end of the war in Europe], but that would have taken things too far. That event belonged in another film. It was an event that was taking me much too far afield. I therefore stopped just before Sétif, though I had in fact written the scenes that would have occurred after his return to Algeria. I realized that I was opening up another chapter, which was going to shift the focus of the film. The focus of the film is this old man who winds up in his tiny room and sits waiting. He is there at the end of his life, and I wanted to engrave it totally within the history of France.

Returning to Abdelkader, a complex character whose name makes reference to a figure in the Algerian resistance, he leads these men to combat, but he doesn’t much believe in the combat to which he is leading them. You yourself, do you feel yourself symbolically identical to Abdelkader, similarly leading your troops, these actors?

Absolutely, up until last night (the Cannes screening). It wasn’t by desire, but I had the obligation to be the leader of the movement, supported by all of them. There was a lot of sharing, but I was at the head of the column. In this kind of adventure you need structure, you’ve got to lay out a direction and stick with it. For four months, with 200 people on the set, we had to stay on track; I imposed that on them, in a friendly manner, and they accepted it willingly, so that everyone could be at the same place.

Regarding the aesthetic choices for the film, in comparison with your preceding film [Little Senegal], here you chose something much more epic, with a very gripping musical soundtrack. Was that by choice?

Absolutely. I didn’t want to treat this film as I would have treated any other, e.g., Little Senegal, that is, with a more restrained, sober cinematic style. Here, for this story, I absolutely wanted to connect with the general public in France, in North Africa, in the rest of Africa and in the rest of Europe and the world if possible, but first of all with those who were partners in this history. I told myself that I was going to make a film with battle scenes, with characters who were a little heroic. I wanted to go in the direction of popular film—I say that without any condescension. I love mainstream film, it has produced great films. This was the genre that I wanted. I didn’t want to shut myself up in an overly realistic, documentary-style kind of film; I wanted to take it in another direction. And then it was necessary to take on Hollywood, which made a war film like Saving Private Ryan a few years ago. You can’t go into filmmaking if you don’t also have on some level the cinematic ambition to be able to make your mark with the public at large and at the same time to advance History, and to do that you need to use the tools that narrative cinema gives us in this kind of epic film. I very much liked Saving Private Ryan, A Bridge Too Far, The Longest Day, etc. I’d like this to be a film that is replayed on French television in five years and also in ten years. I wanted to tackle this kind of cinematic storytelling.

Can you tell us how you came to film the last scene in Alsace, the cemetery scene, several weeks after the rest?

I wrote several scenes for the end that were set in 2006, today, the sixtieth anniversary, but I told myself, “I’m not going to shoot it immediately, I’ll edit the film, then think about how I want to end it.” I kept several scenes but not all, and I shot the end after having finished the entire film, six months later. Because I also had the possibility of constructing this man’s narrative with the help of dates and subtitles. I could give this man his life in the present, and that was important for me. That would also say that the past, this history, makes us think about today, and about our future.

Each of these characters is somewhat emblematic, a kind of war film icon. Except for a character who is much more ambiguous, that of the sergeant, and later master sergeant. Can you speak to us about the ambiguity surrounding the character of Martinez?

I didn’t just want to put positive characters in my film because in history there are plenty who aren’t, and especially in wartime. Because I met soldiers like him, former colonials (pieds noirs), French soldiers, North African soldiers, African soldiers, who told me their shared story. The ex-colonial Martinez lived in the mud with them, he also lived in the cold, in the fear. There was a hierarchy: first the French soldier, then the colonial soldier—that is, the Frenchman who lived in the colonial land—and then the “native” soldier. Thus there is a first, second, and third class. But despite this, there came a time when they had to go into combat, live the same things, and that’s what profoundly unified them despite the hierarchy. In combat the hierarchy no longer exists, the fear is the same, and that’s how they lived it. Looking each other in the eyes constantly during the scenes of liberation and during the difficult scenes--in the eyes of each there was equality.

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