A father and a son torn from their Fulani village and sent to fight in France during the First World War: in “Tirailleurs”, in theaters on Wednesday, Mathieu Vadepied tells, by the intimate, the crushed destinies of Senegalese riflemen.
The film, which comes out in Senegal two days after its release in France, had been presented in the Official Selection – but out of competition – of the Cannes Film Festival 2022.
Seventeen years earlier, in the same place, a film on North African skirmishers during the Second World War caused a sensation in Cannes: “Indigènes”, by Rachid Bouchareb which earned the cast a collective interpretation prize.
This time, Mathieu Vadepied focused his story on the only Senegalese skirmishers with, in the title role, the star Omar Sy.
“This story links the two countries, Senegal and France. It’s completely my story. It’s also completely my identity”he declared at the end of December in Dakar during a press conference presenting the film.
Shot partly in Senegal but also in the Ardennes, the film follows the fate of a father, Bakary (Omar Sy) and his son Thierno (Alassane Diong), who are torn from their families and find themselves in the trenches of the Great War, in tricolor uniform.
“Not here to blame”
Beyond the horror of war, Vadepied puts the difficult relationship between a father and his son at the center of his film. Faced with Bakary who just wants to bring his boy home alive, Thierno, galvanized by military ambition and the discovery of France, threatens to escape him.
If “Tirailleurs” is first and foremost a father’s fight to save his son from war, the political significance of this film is unequivocal.
“The idea is to question. To question the historical relationship of France to its former colonies, what do we say about that today, do we know what we have do ?”his director told AFP at the Cannes Film Festival.
If he denies having made a “frontally political” film, he hopes that it will clean up the “cavities” of the national narrative. And above all, he says, “We don’t act as if it doesn’t exist, we don’t move without. These stories have to be told, passed on. Everyone has to know them”.
Created by Napoleon III in 1857 in Senegal, hence its name, the infantry corps of skirmishers then expanded in its recruitment to men from other regions of West and Central Africa conquered by France at the end of the 19th century.
The skirmishers were more than 200,000 to fight during the First World War, 150,000 for the Second, 60,000 in Indochina. This is one of the first times their story has been brought to the screen.
“We are not here to make people feel guilty, but to recognize painful stories and free themselves from them”assures Mathieu Vadepied.
Forgotten by French politicians for decades, the Senegalese skirmishers and their heirs still deplore a lack of recognition today, in particular because of lower pensions than their French brothers in arms.
“Today, our generation needs this story for our construction, to take history, to know how we build ourselves in relation to these two countries”continued the interpreter of Lupin, co-producer of the film.