Camp de Thiaroye

1944. Senegalese soldiers who fought in the French army are brought back from Europe and put in a camp near Dakar. They have back pay owed to them before they are discharged. They wait in the camp. The food is bad, the rules arbitrary, and the officers treat them not as soldiers but as labourers. Then they are told the pay will be short; the exchange rate is given as the reason. The men refuse. The resistance grows and the camp command decides it is a mutiny. Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow direct. It is a Senegalese production. The event behind the narrative is real: in December 1944 at Thiaroye, French troops fired on unarmed soldiers. The number killed was argued over for many years and the official figures were questioned. The film won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1988. It was long unseen in France and its distribution was blocked; it only became watchable there years later. Sembène is a founding figure of African cinema and had served in the French army himself; the narrative's knowledge comes from there. What is most striking is the language; French, Wolof and a mixed military slang are spoken together in the camp, and the narrative uses that as a question of power. The narrative does not debate colonialism, it shows how it worked; every scene is about a rule and about whom that rule is applied to. Who it is for: anyone curious about African cinema and the history of colonialism. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the acting theatrical in places, and the ending is hard.