Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
1943. They have never stepped foot on French soil but because France was at war, Said, Abdelkader, Messaoud and Yassir enlist in the French Army, along with 130,000 other “indigenous” soldiers, to liberate the “fatherland” from the Nazi enemy. Heroes that history has forgotten…
Days of Glory (Indigènes) earns its strongest marks for Novelty — it fills a genuine historical blind spot by centering the overlooked contribution of North African soldiers to France's liberation, a perspective almost entirely absent from WWII cinema. The institutional discrimination woven into the narrative gives it a distinctive moral urgency. The plot is solid and emotionally effective but follows a fairly conventional 'band of soldiers' arc once the thematic framing is established. Acting is committed and naturalistic across the ensemble, with Jamel Debbouze and Sami Bouajila particularly strong, though no single performance reaches truly exceptional heights. Cinematography is competent and sometimes striking in the Provence and Italian sequences but rarely transcends genre conventions for war films of its era. The ending is genuinely moving and politically pointed — the final scene revealing the frozen pensions of surviving veterans lands as a powerful coda — but it functions more as an editorial statement than a fully resolved dramatic conclusion.