With a Special Screening at Lincoln Center and two major 2006 awards at Cannes, including Best Actor shared by its several leads, French-Moroccan-Algerian-Belgian Days of Glory/Indigènes is scheduled for U.S. release a fortnight before finding out if a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar will swell its box office. Its passionate subject is the event cause, if not precisely the colonial-racist root, of an injustice the results of which have been treated in a handful of purely African films (ones at least that have reached any First World screens at all). Pride of place among the latter must go to father of Black African cinema Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s Camp Thiaroye/Camp de Thiaroye, about France’s postbellum massacre of “native” troops peaceably demanding back pay; too, there are Rachid Bouchareb’s animated nine-minute The Colonial Friend/L’Ami ya bon on the same treachery, and Kollo Daniel Sanou’s feature Tasuma, the Fighter, about an ex-combatant’s dignified wait for unconscionably delayed veteran’s benefits. 

Indigènes -- “indigenous people,” “natives,” descriptive or derogatory, depending -- covers, rather, the period of World War II training and fighting that gave rise to the shame of Europe’s dishonoring promises made in its hour of need. This is not to say that the story -- co-screenplay and –dialogue by director/co-producer Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle -- does not strongly bring out wartime inequalities among those fighting the Nazis, between those of European blood and those of mixed, immigrant or native background. Facing the same terrors, the latter are shown to receive cold popular and official recognition, be promoted infrequently if at all and suffer cruel indignities, for smaller pay and frozen pensions.

Some part of this is really the emphasis of the current practice of end titles (and of press handouts), a tacked-on summary of the future. Nevertheless, the film has succeeded where years of agitation have not: attempting to repair images of France’s racial-ethnic divide, perhaps prodded by wife Bernadette’s reported “Jacques, we must do something” following a private presidential screening, Chirac has announced a redress of pension grievances.

Using b&w cloud-shadowed titled overheads that turn to color, the film traces four representative enlisted or called-up Algerians, the dim brother of one, and their sergeant, from basic training through the Invasion on to Liberation. Highly effective in imaging the horror and fear of combat, it may be less spectacularly so than Saving Private Ryan but is also less pedestrian than Spielberg’s after its unsurpassable D-day beachhead minutes.

Bouchabeb’s military cemetery coda (and marvelous mute seconds in a sad apartment) will draw comparisons with that other film, but is better in not giving family-cheery assurance or rounding out Spielberg’s opening frame which implies film-long memory-narration by the saved lone survivor private who actually was not present for most of his tale. The studious Algerian who here remains alive into a haunted today and graveyard visit, does so through the caprice of fate, or war; indeed, his frequent defiance of authority leads one to expect the very opposite for Corporal Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila).

Along with others from 1943 Algiers, he is swept up as cannon fodder for the desperate motherland which none of them have seen and where they would be second class, whose white colonists scorn them in their own country, but which appeals to pro patria, rege, lege et grege and professes pour le mèrite. Among his companions singled out are Yassir (Samy Nacéri) and his less Berber-looking brother Larbi (Assaad Bouab), lonely Messaoud (Roshdy Zem), and illiterate Saïd (Jamel Debbouze).

In liberated Marseille, tall melancholy-eyed Messaoud finds a night’s (and promise of a life’s) love with blonde Irène (Aurélie Eltvedt), but racist censorship dooms them. Short, dark and unquestioning, only child Saïd becomes their sergeant’s personal aide, ridiculed for his dainty subservience and called “Aïcha” (so in subtitles, which should have clarified that this is Arabic for the female name Ayesha).

There must be other human depths, but these are not hinted aside from the cases of Abdelkader and, most intriguing, Sergeant Martínez (Bernard Blancan). Stern in disciplining and defending his men, this NCO goes beyond that type of standard war movie leader. Distinct from Matthew Broderick’s soft-hands colonel of another inevitable comparison, Glory, he is also different in that he only appears an outsider (although not “pure” French), for he sentimentally carries a photo which reveals closer kinship, the accidental disclosure of which leads to rage and further complexity.

These are the Days of Glory troops who are the core of the de-romanticized war to save white, Western civilization. They stand their ground even as they see the falseness of that society. The Marseillaise call to “Ye sons of France, awake to glory!” rings hollow, yet these brown skins do not falter. 

(Released by IFC Films and rated "R" for war violence and brief language.)