As well as being successful as a war movie described as a kind of a North African Saving Private Ryan, the film deals with discriminatory treatment of French Africans which is still an issue today, and led to a change in government policy.

This African soldiers have never set foot in Motherland France but because France was at war, they are willing to liberate France from the German occupancy and yet they are treated shabbily in an army organisation prejudiced in favour of the European French.

The discrimination by the French authorities against these soldiers continued as successive French governments froze the war pensions of these indigenous veterans, and it was only after the film's release that the government policy was changed to bring foreign combatant pensions into line with what French veterans are paid