A Senegalese platoon of soldiers from the French Free Army are returned from combat in France and held for a temporary time in a military encampment with barbed wire fences and guard towers in the desert. Among their numbers are Sergeant Diatta, the charismatic leader of the troop who was educated in Paris and has a French wife and child, and Pays, a Senegalese soldier left in a state of shock from the war and concentration camps and who can only speak in guttural screams and grunts.
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Camp de Thiaroye by Senegalese Director is a war movie without a war. Set on an army post in Senegal towards the final days of WWII, it follows a regiment of the French West African Armed Forces who have returned from a tour of duty in Europe. The story is an allegory for the resistance movement to colonialism that sprung up after the war and led to the end of colonialism. Often bloody, it captures the relationship between American soldiers stationed in Dakar, French commanding officers and the French West Africans while touching on issues of racism, inferiority complex and black on black relationships. Never one to lead the audience, Sembene takes his time staging scenes often with beautiful framing that eats up the edges of the screen. It may leisure and some scenes are didactic but it never wavers in its utmost honesty and its eventual humanism resulting from a cataclysmic ending that is both gripping that echoes the refrain that maybe we are all crazy. It is one of the better movies of this master of cinema and in this reviewer's opinion, a 10/10.
