Co-directed and co-written by Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, Camp de Thiaroye excavates a harrowing postwar tragedy from 1944: the Thiaroye Massacre, in which France murdered hundreds of West African veterans for demanding unpaid wages and protesting unfair treatment. Members of a West African platoon, many of them former prisoners of war, are placed in the Thiaroye military camp where they await their repatriation. Intuitively, the soldiers sense the overlap between colonialism and fascism: no matter how hard they try to ignore their surroundings—their observations accompanied by elegant tracking shots and precise set design—the camp looks and feels like a German internment camp. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, Camp de Thiaroye was a painful and personal production for Sembène, who was fighting in Niger as a soldier for the Free French Army when the massacre occurred. The film also broke ground as a Senegalese-Algerian-Tunisian co-production, made without European money. Unrestricted in its indictment of France’s postwar hypocrisy, Camp de Thiaroye is one of the greatest war films of all time. It was banned for three years in Senegal and for a decade in France, where it was only released on DVD in 2005.