The French war canon has a significant gap in it. From La Grande Illusion to A Very Long Engagement, the story of France in the First World War is largely a story about Frenchmen — white Frenchmen, in the trenches, in the mud. The 600,000 African and North African soldiers who served under the French flag during that conflict appear as background figures at best, decorative presence at worst. Father & Soldier (originally Tirailleurs) is the first major French narrative film to make one of those men its protagonist. That alone makes it matter.

But Mathieu Vadepied’s debut matters beyond its subject. The film could have been worthy and inert — the kind of historical correction that arrives with press-release earnestness and leaves without disturbing anything. Instead it earns its ground through specificity: not the Tirailleurs as a mass, but Bakary Diallo (Omar Sy), one man who enlists in the French army not out of patriotism or ideology but to stand beside his 17-year-old son Thierno (Alassane Diong), who has been forcibly recruited from their Senegalese village.

The premise is clean enough to work as melodrama. Vadepied uses it for something quieter and more precise. Bakary does not try to protect Thierno by shielding him from the war — he tries to protect him by keeping himself between his son and whatever comes next. The film watches this strategy fail by degrees, as Thierno grows into the war and the war grows into him, and Bakary realizes the son he is trying to bring home may no longer be quite the son he brought.

Omar Sy has spent much of his career as the warmest person in any room he enters. Father & Soldier finds him in a different register entirely. Bakary is a man of few words and enormous patience, someone whose authority comes from stillness rather than volume. It is a technically demanding performance — Sy carries extended sequences with almost no dialogue, through physical posture, through the particular quality of his attention to Alassane Diong’s Thierno. The scenes where the two simply share the frame, not speaking, register as the film’s emotional core. Vadepied knows when to hold on them.

Diong, in his first major role, matches him. Thierno’s arc from a village boy trying to survive to something that resembles a soldier is conveyed largely through the body — a straightening of the spine, a different way of holding a rifle — rather than through the kind of dramatic revelation lesser films would have scheduled for the third act. The performance is notable for what it refuses: the explanatory monologue, the explicit moment of change. The transformation happens in the cuts.

Vadepied shoots the trenches without exploiting them. Julien Roux’s cinematography makes the mud and darkness feel functional rather than atmospheric — these are working conditions, not spectacle. The contrast with the Senegalese landscapes in the opening sequences, shot with warmth and specific light, gives the film a visual argument before the screenplay has made its case: the characters arrive from a place that exists, and they return to a front that consumes.

Father & Soldier can feel lean to the point of understatement in its middle section, where the accumulation of wartime events passes without the escalation some viewers expect. The choice is deliberate: Vadepied is interested in duration, in what prolonged exposure to horror does to the relationship between the two men, not in incident-plotting. Not every viewer will find the pace rewarding.

What the film achieves is rarer. It places on record, in the grammar of narrative cinema, a story that French filmmaking had been content to leave in the historical margins for a century. Tirailleurs will sit on the same shelf as Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006), the earlier recovery of North African soldiers in the Second World War, and the two films together make an argument no single one of them could alone. France has debated and disputed this history for decades. Its cinema has finally, cautiously, begun to look at it.