Making room for women in the last chapter of the war story: Fanta Régina Nacro’s La Nuit de la vérité/The Night of Truth

Traditionally, the war film has been a primarily masculine genre. To some extent, the absence of women in the war story merely reflected the way wars had been fought throughout history, but by the end of the twentieth-century, the nature of war around the globe was changing substantially, and recent engagements have largely been civil conflicts. While the majority of combatants in Africa’s ethnic wars have been men, women are increasingly implicated in the violence. Despite her obvious involvement in hostilities, however, woman’s voice is rarely represented in the negotiations for peace at the end of hostilities, a process inevitably dominated by men, generally military leaders. In her film, La Nuit de la vérité/The Night of Truth (2004), Fanta Régina Nacro describes the reconciliation process in the wake of civil conflict in an imaginary African country. Peace talks are clearly controlled by the men in the film, but Nacro’s representation of women demonstrates how their role in war has changed and ultimately suggests that they have a role to play in the success of peace. This article explores narrative and cinematographic devices through which Nacro’s film makes a place for women in the last chapter of the war story, ultimately situating the film-maker’s work in the context of recent scholarship by social scientists who have studied Africa’s new wars and their reconciliation processes from the perspective of gender.