Black and White in Color
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Year Released: 1976
Rating: 1.5
French soldiers, including grumpy absinthe drinker Sergeant Bosselet (Jean Carmet) and educated Hubert Fresnoy (Jacques Spiesser), are stationed in Cameroon and find they don't have much to do - the residents are quite laid back (and not ravenous cannibals as previously thought) - so when they're notified World War I is underway, they get riveled up with nationalist pride, gather together an "army" and attack the Germans who are also in Africa. It establishes from the beginning that it's both anti-war and anti-colonialism - the Africans mock the imperialists while forced to "carry" them around - and then repeats that "message" to the point of exhaustion: the villagers, meanwhile, are "sacrificed" to fight for people they downright despise (there's even some gruesome trench warfare). Apparently the grim humor was enough to win it the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (the first and only one for the Ivory Coast so far), but I think it's less funny than a single episode of Benny Hill.