Florent-Emilio Siri initially wanted to shoot in Kabylie, where the story is set, but gave up on the idea and set his eyes on Morocco when he realized the region didn't have any infrastructure capable of handling a big shoot such as this one.
While he maintains that this film is purely a work of fiction, screenwriter Patrick Rotman nevertheless claims that nearly every moment in the film is inspired by stories he heard while working on his documentary L'ennemi intime (2002).
When the platoon is ambushed, the radio operator reports that they are being fired upon by MG-42s, which are captured German machine guns from the Second World War. These machine guns have a high rate of fire and produce a different sound than that edited into the film.