Days of Glory: Plight of Algerian war heroes comes to our screens

In September last year, Jacques Chirac went to the charity premiere of a new French film that was fast becoming a media sensation. According to excitable news reports, the President emerged from the cinema moist-eyed and shaken. "Jacques, you must do something about this," cried Bernadette Chirac, and her husband readily agreed: "There is an obvious injustice," he said.

The film, Days of Glory, is set in 1944. Occupied France was on its knees when General De Gaulle began a recruiting drive in North Africa that attracted some 230,000 men to sign up. Many had never set foot in the "fatherland", which they now swore, so fervently, to liberate. The ensuing campaign, which pushed north from Provence as far as Alsace, played a critical role in the war, diverting Nazi resources from both the Allied offensive in the West and the Soviet army on the Eastern front. In 1945, these soldiers were briefly hailed as heroes. Soon afterwards, however, while the Normandy landings and the battle of Stalingrad were enshrined in history books, the Armée d'Afrique (Army of Africa) was largely forgotten.

It's a safe bet that few, if any, of those veterans were sitting among France's captains of industry and political elite at the President's black tie screening, whose tickets cost €1,000 a pop. When France's colonies achieved independence in the early Sixties, their pensions were frozen; by last year, they were - depending on country and rank - between four and 10 times less than those of French nationals. This was the "obvious injustice" that Chirac recognised in his Damascene conversion, and which he scrambled within weeks to rectify.

But there was much more at stake in the furore surrounding Days of Glory. "It's not just the pensions, but everything else mixed up with them," says the film's director, Rachid Bouchareb, who was born in Paris in 1959 to Algerian parents. "It's about our relationship with the former colonisers, the history of France as it's written in the school books, the way those men's children live today and all the conflicts simmering between the West and the Muslim world."

Even as France was celebrating VE Day, Algeria began to demand its own liberation. In May 1945, a series of uprisings there were quashed, and the subsequent reprisals by the French authorities left between 8,000 and 10,000 dead. In 1954, the unrest escalated into a general uprising and the Algerian War.

The Armée d'Afrique veterans who came to France after the liberation of Algeria were rebranded as undesirable immigrants, an issue that later helped propel the far-Right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen to the brink of winning the 2002 presidential election. The deprivation suffered by the mainly Arab and black inhabitants of France's working-class suburbs built up to riots that rocked the nation in 2005. "All these events have combined to create a reluctance to turn those soldiers into heroes," says Bernard Blancan, one of the film's stars.

More unexpectedly, the Arab community also drew a veil over the role of the Armée d'Afrique, and even many of the cast members - often the children and grandchildren of veterans - knew little or nothing of it. "I didn't learn about it in school," says Roschdy Zem. "I only discovered in the archives that my grandfather's brother had fought in the [Second World] War. My family had never talked about it. I think this is something very oriental. You don't pass on the painful aspects of the past. It's a way of protecting your children."

Something else astonished Zem about his meetings with former soldiers. "There was a lot of humility in them, and very little rancour. It was strange. They were very proud to have fought in this war and, if they had to do it again, they would. What upset them wasn't the pensions. It was the lack of recognition."

It goes without saying that the story has a wider international significance. The film is called Les Indigènes ("Natives") in France, but its English-language title is calculated to evoke Edward Zwick's 1989 movie Glory, about the neglected bravery of black soldiers in the American Civil War. More recently, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers highlighted the role of Native Americans in the Second World War. In the United States, where Days of Glory opened last month, it has been a counterblast to prevailing anti-Islamic sentiments. "It was good for audiences to see Muslims fighting against Fascism, side by side with the Americans, and liberating Europe," comments Bouchareb wryly. "No one knew about that."

It is scarcely surprising that no one wanted to make Days of Glory. Bouchareb - who conceived it long before events in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even before September 11 - spent years raising the relatively hefty budget of €14.5m (£9.8m). That he managed to do so at all was chiefly thanks to the cast, all well-known names in France - not just as Arab performers, but in the mainstream cinema. Samy Naceri, a chiselled, blue-eyed actor who shot to fame in the hit Taxi comedy franchise, had to learn Arabic for his role.

Jamel Debbouze, hugely popular thanks to his television show Jamel Comedy Club and roles in blockbusters like Amélie and Astérix and Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre, was a key player. Debbouze is famously capricious, but his commitment to Days of Glory is unquestioned. Apart from taking a big pay cut, the outspoken, anti-establishment star endured a humiliating process of schmoozing politicians and posing with their children for photographs in order to secure funding.

A particular ordeal was flattering Nicolas Sarkozy. The Minister of the Interior is notorious for his zero-tolerance reaction to the 2005 riots, and their predominantly Arab and black protesters; earlier that summer, too, he had said that the crime-ridden banlieues ought to be "cleaned with a power hose", an inflammatory phrase that many saw as an incitement to ethnic cleansing. "Having to meet him irritated me," Debbouze said, with some understatement.

Today, those involved with the film speak of Chirac's sudden change of heart in cynical tones. Zem shrugs and says that it was the case of a lame-duck president exploiting a media event. Besides, he points out, the increase, which kicked in on 1 January 2007, is not retroactive. "If there were 48 years of back payments to catch up with, it would be a nice little sum. But that's not the case."

Bouchareb downplays the role of the film in securing the decision. "Thousands of people had been lobbying for this for 40 years," he notes. "War widows, veterans' associations, African heads of state, the European Court of Justice. We were the straw that broke Chirac's back. He did his sums. He said to himself, 'Well, we must be talking about 80,000 people still alive - that's €100m a year.' The elections are coming up. Chirac will be gone in a few months. He just told his ministers to find the money. What does he care?"

In this year's presidential elections, which kick off on 22 April, immigration remains a running sore. Le Pen is back in the arena, and Sarkozy has bounced back from the 2005 debacle to become the centre-right candidate. In such a combustible climate, what has been the reaction to Days of Glory among these heroes' disenchanted, disenfranchised children?

Bouchareb takes a robust view. "Our parents were still colonised. They couldn't go to school and many were illiterate." In the film, the soldiers submit, resentfully but not militantly, to wretched conditions and institutional racism. But, says the director, "the younger generation never wanted to stay discreet and invisible - not to rock the boat. They are angry, and that includes me. We quickly entered into conflict with French society. Yesterday we refused to work in factories and wash cars. Today we burn cars." He is now writing a sequel, which will take in the Indochina and Algerian wars and will try to find the origins of the current disillusionment.

Others involved with Days of Glory view it more positively, if cautiously, as a small step forward. Zem, an elegant, thoughtful man who has just directed his first film, Mauvaise Foi, a comedy about a love affair between an Arab and a Jew, believes the best way to bounce back from the riots is to tell stories that have nothing to do with them. "We've got beyond films like La Haine," Zem says, referring to Mathieu Kassovitz's controversial 1995 film about violence and racism in the suburbs. "Today we want to show how much we're integrated."

Blancan, who took part in public discussions about Days of Glory all across France, declares himself heartened by what he heard there. "This film helps young people understand who they are: they're French and yet not French. So they should demand the same rights, stop burning cars and register to vote." Blancan pauses and smiles ruefully. "Maybe I'm being naive. Something strong and positive happened in these debates, the idea of a rapprochement between our communities. But I don't think the political discourse, on the right or on the left, has taken it up."

'Days of Glory' opens on 30 March