Days of Glory

Days of Glory (Indigènes, 2006) is Rachid Bouchareb's war drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Four young men from North Africa — Saïd, Abdelkader, Messaoud and Yassir — sign up to fight for a country none of them has ever set foot in.

The year is 1943. Alongside more than 130,000 fellow colonial recruits, they pull on French uniforms and march to free a "homeland" they know only from posters. The army feeds them into the worst of it — Italy, the Provence landings, the Vosges — yet the promotions, the home leave, even the fresh tomatoes in the rations go to the French-born soldiers first. Their last stand comes in an Alsatian village, where a handful of them hold off a German battalion on their own.

Bouchareb skips the flag-waving and follows men who won the battles, then got quietly erased from the textbooks and shortchanged on their pensions for decades. At Cannes the whole male ensemble — Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila, Bernard Blancan — shared the Best Actor prize, and Algeria sent the film into the Oscars' foreign-language race. A hard, honest watch that sends you looking up what actually happened next. Stream Days of Glory (2006) online on iFILM.