Camp de Thiaroye

Ousmane Sembène, Thierno Faty Sow
Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, 1988

A powerfully incisive classic based on historical fact, Camp de Thiaroye won a top prize at the Venice Film Festival but was banned in France for a decade and censored in Senegal. African troops returning to their native Senegal from Europe at the close of World War II are placed by French authorities in transit camps, where they are faced with racist attitudes as deep as those many of them have just experienced while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. While the soldiers are ostensibly being held only temporarily before discharge, it soon becomes clear that the French are using the camps to reestablish the supremacy they held over African citizens prior to the war. Tension escalates to rebellion. “This, in microcosm, is a story of colonialism, told from the receiving end and taken to a radical conclusion. Sembène and Sow have made what is not only a humane, passionate film, but an honest and vital memorial to those men who died . . . at Camp Thiaroye” (Tom Charity, Time Out).

Susan Oxtoby

FILM DETAILS

Screenwriter

Ousmane Sembène
Thierno Faty Sow

Cinematographer

Ismail Lakhdar Hamina

Language

French
Wolof
German
English
with English subtitles

Print Info

Color
DCP
153 mins

Source

Cineteca di Bologna

Additional Info

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.

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