Few know the film—the first feature-length film by a West African director—was based on a real-life incident, a real tragedy lost in colonial archives.
Doyle Calhoun
Doyle Calhoun is a PhD candidate in French at Yale University, where his work focuses on histories of colonizing violence and resistance in African and Caribbean literatures and cinema. His dissertation, “The Suicide Archive(s): Literary Resistance in the Wake of French Empire,” lays out a literary history of suicide as a response to enslavement, colonization, and neocolonial expansion in former sites of French empire. His articles have appeared in journals such as Research in African Literatures, French Studies, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Paragraph. 
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.