A French film about the daily lives of ordinary people participating in the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis is drawing audiences to cinemas. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

The film, 'Notre Salut' (Our Salvation), with its modern lighting, improvised scenes and anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack, is far from the standard historical costume drama about the second world war. It focuses on the Vichy regime, which ensured the deportation of a quarter of France's Jewish population to concentration camps.

The film, given the English-language title 'A Man of His Time', had a strong cinema opening in France this week, particularly among young audiences, at a time when the country is soul-searching ahead of next spring's presidential election.

The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by its writer and director, Emmanuel Marre, that gave insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime. The central character, administrator Henri Marre, unthinkingly becomes a cog in the machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths.

Marc Olivier Baruch, a historian and specialist on state administrators in the Vichy regime, said: 'There are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground, and that is what is interesting about this film.'

For Baruch, the most chilling scene in the film is the bureaucratic nitpicking about the costs incurred by providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and chamber pots. The central character 'never chooses to reflect on things or look at what he's doing, to wonder what his room for manoeuvre is'.

Baruch said the film's sense of unease was a pull for modern audiences because today France was 'in a time of great uncertainty... There's a strong lack of confidence among French people in their elites and in their state and that has been going on for a long time.'

He said the Vichy regime had resonance today as a period in history. 'The Pétain dictatorship is the only moment when the far right was in power since 1820. There were these four years at the heart of the 20th century when the far right was in power and clearly for French people in 2026 and 2027 that is interesting... There has been a certain unease in modern France that it would be better to stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, stop the masochism [of looking back]. That of course is stupid, and not possible.'

Film critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise of the far right across Europe and in France.

Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied the place of the Vichy regime in collective memory, wrote of the film in Le Monde: 'The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what [the RN] is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.'

Emmanuel Marre, the film's writer-director, won the best Screenplay prize at the Cannes film festival in 2026. He began working on the story more than a decade ago after the discovery of the letters from his great-grandfather that his family had kept in a drawer.

He told France Inter radio: 'There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France... there is a phantom memory of the collaboration. With this film, we wanted...'