L'Abécédaire du Maréchal

An investigation into the nature, details and reasons for the collaboration between France’s Vichy government and Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944.

World War II, June 1940. France has fallen and suffers the relentless boot of Nazi Germany. But Algeria, the prized French colony in North Africa, remains part of the territory controlled by the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. A strict colonial order is maintained: the French of European origin rule, while local Jews are stripped of French citizenship and discrimination against the mainly Muslim population increases.

The rise and fall of Nazi Germany in part through the use of classical allegory.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline described the period he spent in Sigmaringen in his delirious and infernal novel, Castle to Castle, published in 1957. The last months before the German “moment of truth”, as they’ve never been portrayed before: Documented in delirious reality. A documentary film based on Céline’s texts. A screen adaption with documentary material.

Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.

In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.

Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.

With the ending of the Spanish Civil War, a dispirited band of volunteers from the International Brigades seeks refuge in France. But on reaching the frontier, the band is disarmed, and all are detained as political prisoners. Then come instructions from Vichy that all fit prisoners are to be sent to Morocco to work on the Sahara railway for the Germans. However, one man manages to escape to London with vital information for the Allies.

In occupied France, a convicted thief and murderer escapes the guillotine when a bombing raid strikes the prison, but is quickly re-captured by the inspector of the Surete responsible for his original arrest. Fearing the guillotine more than his actual death, the convict inveigles the inspector to help him with a plan to rescue 100 Frenchmen taken by the Gestapo following an act of sabotage: he will confess to being the saboteur and allow himself to be executed by firing squad, the Gestapo's method of execution, thus freeing the 100 men.