CAMP DE THIAROYE

This crucial pan-African film about the importance of remembrance does justice to those known as the Senegalese tirailleurs, the majority of whom were drafted into the French army against their will to fight the Nazis. After making substantial sacrifices and suffering thousands of casualties to defend France, the tirailleurs who had survived the war were nonetheless humiliated and mistreated by the French army. Instead of rewarding them, the French forces bombarded and massacred these soldiers when they demanded their right to the end-of-enlistment recompense. When the film was finished, Cannes 1988 rejected it. However, in September of the same year, it was screened as an official selection at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize.

Many African films have received the support of French funding, but Camp de Thiaroye is one of a series of films whose very existence French funders and producers did everything in their power to prevent. They argued that such films were highly subversive since they denounced the barbarity of colonisation. A Western world that continues to brandish its claim to human rights was incapable of tolerating films about its criminal past. The film was only made possible by all-South funding from Morocco, Senegal and Guinea. When it became a hit at festivals around the world at the height of the African National Congress’s anti-apartheid movement, a racist Swiss distributor purchased the exclusive distribution rights for the whole of the West at a high price – not so that he could distribute it, but simply to ensure it would be fully blocked for the ten years of its contract. (Mohamed Challouf)

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Tunisian Ministry of Culture and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture and Historical Heritage. Special thanks to Mohammed Challouf. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.