Roots of Bias

The movie, called "Indigenes" ("natives") in France, has created a stir beyond the simple boundaries of its story about a band of Moroccans and Algerians fighting valiantly in the French army during World War II.

President Jacques Chirac, who early this month requested a private screening of the film, which will be released as "Days of Glory" in English, ordered his government to revise a four-decade freeze on pensions for non-French war veterans, most of them from north and west Africa.

The decision, which raises the pensions for former troops from France's ex-colonies to the same level as their French counterparts at a cost of 110 million euros ($140 million) a year, was "an act of justice," Chirac told his cabinet.

"We owe it to these men who paid a price in blood, and to their children and their grandchildren, many of whom are French," he said.

"Days of Glory," by French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb, is largely credited with the decision.

Movie draws controversy

The movie concentrates on some of the 300,000 soldiers from France's former African colonies who made up more than half the 550,000 troops in its army fighting the Germans.

It is unflinching in detailing the humiliations and bias suffered by those colonial forces who were pressed to fight for the "motherland" but who were treated as second-class beings by their white superiors.

The interest in the film brought attention to the pension freeze imposed by Paris in 1959, which resulted in Moroccan veterans, for instance, often receiving little more than one-tenth of what a former French soldier gets.

A 2001 court ruling pushing the government to revise the freeze had resulted in only slight pension increases, in which the cost of living in the veteran's home country was used as a benchmark, not the pension paid in France.

Many in the country's sizeable Arab immigrant community were expected to flock to the new film, as were others curious to see a chapter often neglected in French history books.

Screening of the film came amid heightened tensions in high-immigrant suburbs around Paris which had been involved in the riots which shook the country last November.

On Monday, 220 police raided a housing project in the southern suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes to arrest 11 people they suspected of participating in an ambush of two officers that left both badly beaten.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France's ambitious interior minister who hopes to succeed Chirac in elections next year, has been aggressively promoting tough law-and-order policies and immigration controls.