rfndayitabi

There are films that should not be judged through an aesthetic prism but for their value in the debate of a society that wants to be open and democratic. This film recounts one of the most serious scandals in the history of the USA, a country that never shies away from scandals. The scandal is not so much the fact that the people in power, the neocons gang, lied like tooth-pullers, but that after dragging the country into a useless war, it was managed in a calamitous way! To cite just one example, the administration of conquered Iraq was run with such incompetence that that country has yet to recover.

Religious fanaticism, indeed religion per se, has an inevitable corollary, the refusal of individual autonomy. Followers of religions tend to want to impose their moral principles on others even in highly private matters such as life, death and sex. To be able to justify these positions, they must necessarily deny the advances of science. Today, thanks to advances in medicine, biological life can be extended virtually indefinitely. This creates a contradiction between the possibility and the opportunity of life. In this episode, reason and fanaticism clash: a dignified death against the superstition that afflicts too many people, in America and elsewhere.

Father & soldier is a linear and no-nonsense film, which radically positions itself "AGAINST" - war, blind obedience to orders, colonialism, the exploitation of men by other men, military and political rhetoric - which makes it actual. The direct comparison between these issues and that atavistic African wisdom that knows how to recognize and defend what is truly important - to be united, to protect one's family, to lead one's life with dignity and respect - is striking. 1917, Senegal. The French army kidnaps young people from villages to forcefully enlist them and send them to fight in the Great War. Bakary would like to protect his son Thierno but fails to free him from the French colonial gang and to stay close to him he in turn enlists and sends him to the same African platoon. Mathieu Vadepied, the director and writer, adheres to his characters and throws them into a story that seems to be developing by the minute. Omar Sy plays the role of Bakary dusting off the Fula language of his origins and takes the risk of losing the immense popularity he has in France to rigorously criticize the French colonial policy and the enormous hypocrisies in the management of the relationship with African immigrants. Father & soldier is a film of few words and few events necessary to illustrate the parable of Thierno, torn between love for his father and the desire to emancipate himself from his authority in order to become a man finally. Even the seduction of the army's promises to guarantee French citizenship to the colonized African soldiers, once the war is won, refers to current events and how African immigrants look at integration in their host country with a mixture of desire and mistrust.