Voices of Africa

Days of Glory

Indigènes

An Oscar contender for best foreign-language feature, Days of Glory is a rather conventional war movie with an unconventional subject. Rachid Bouchareb's film – which already earned its cast a collective acting prize at Cannes – depicts the travails of a group of North African men who fight their way across Europe during World War II. For various reasons, they have enlisted to defend a „motherland” that they've never seen. As directed by Rachid Bouchareb, himself born in France to Algerian immigrants, „Days of Glory“ is a kind of a North African „Saving Private Ryan,“ a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity. What these men are searching for is not any particular soldier but their own honor and sense of themselves.