Le Faux Soir takes a potent real-world premise from occupied Belgium and treats it as a methodical heist: what if the most effective way to challenge state-sanctioned propaganda was to imitate its delivery system, then replace the message inside? Set in 1943, the Belgian-French drama follows a Resistance effort to circulate a counterfeit edition of Le Soir, a respected paper that had been placed under Nazi control and used for propaganda during the occupation.
The film is directed by Michaël R. Roskam, whose earlier features include Bullhead and The Drop. Bernard Falaise and Roskam wrote the screenplay from a book by Marie Istas. It runs 133 minutes, a duration that signals how much attention is given not simply to the audacity of the operation but to every practical obstacle between an idea and a paper landing in someone’s hands.
That concentration gives Le Faux Soir a distinctive identity. This is not a resistance movie built solely around raids, escapes, shootouts, and covert handoffs. Its central “weapon” is the press: the machinery, the type, the paper, the storage spaces, and the distribution plan. The notion is cinematic on its face, but Roskam’s picture reportedly leans hard into the labor and administration behind it. For viewers who love the material reality of old printing, that may be the movie’s main draw. For those expecting the mounting velocity of a classic caper, it may also be where the film tests patience.
A reluctant provocateur becomes a printer for the Resistance
Arieh Worthalter plays Marc Aubrion, an anarchist poet with a confrontational streak and little patience for the occupiers. Before entering an organized Resistance network, Marc’s protest is unruly and intimate: he produces crudely insulting anti-Nazi poems and hides them inside books in library stacks. The gesture is subversive, but its reach is necessarily small. It is a private act of rebellion disguised as a public reading experience.
Marc is brought to the attention of a more coordinated Belgian Resistance group, one already producing an underground newspaper. The organization sees a use for his printing knowledge rather than his poetry. That recruitment moves the story from scattered dissent to collective strategy, and it gives Marc the opportunity to make a proposal far bolder than passing notes between unsuspecting library readers.
His plan is to manufacture a false issue of Le Soir, making it close enough to the Nazi-supervised publication that it can travel beyond the audience already receptive to Resistance material. The gamble is about credibility as much as production. An underground paper reaches people who actively seek it out; a counterfeit version of an established title has the potential to reach readers who assume they are receiving official news.
That makes Le Faux Soir a heist story without the familiar object of theft. The crew is not trying to steal jewels, money, or classified documents. It is trying to seize attention for a single edition and use the occupying authority’s own communications channel against it. The danger is inseparable from the premise: a forgery this visible requires people, supplies, machines, transport, secrecy, and a willingness to proceed under the gaze of the Gestapo.
The physical business of making a newspaper
François Damiens plays Wellner, a printer whose roller presses are framed as instruments of wartime resistance. The film returns repeatedly to the idea that printing equipment is not merely a symbol. It is literal infrastructure for the group’s challenge to the Nazi apparatus.
Roskam reportedly gives considerable screen time to the details that many historical thrillers compress into montage. There is the acquisition of linotypes, the setting of type, pages pressed against type blocks, and the work of turning written material into a convincing physical object. Distribution is similarly treated as a major dramatic problem. The characters must consider circulation targets, routes, storage, and the question of how a one-time issue can get into enough hands to matter.
It is an unusually granular way to depict the press. Rather than suggesting that resistance publishing happens in a burst of inspirational activity followed by a triumphant reveal, Le Faux Soir dwells on the machinery and the bureaucracy. In that respect, its drama lies in process. Every meeting, technical snag, and logistical revision emphasizes that an idea only becomes politically meaningful when it can be reproduced and delivered.
There is a useful modern parallel in the media systems surrounding games, film, and technology: messages are not defined exclusively by their content. They are also shaped by who controls the route to an audience, the rules governing distribution, and the workers who make publication possible. Labor questions remain central in entertainment today, as seen in ongoing employment claims involving Rockstar and GTA 6 workers. The stakes and circumstances are very different, but both cases underline how institutions depend on networks of people and operations that audiences rarely see.
Style arrives, but the tempo stays restrained
Le Faux Soir uses a 22-day countdown to structure the run-up to the operation. That device is made for escalation, and the movie layers in visible flourishes: zooms, tracking shots, slow-motion group walking, and passages where Christophe Chassol’s score aligns energetically with images of printing work. The music can create a percussive link between sound and the hammering or arrangement of type, making the press itself feel momentarily musical.
Yet the overall approach is described as measured rather than propulsive. At 133 minutes, the accumulation of hurdles can register less like a tightening genre mechanism and more like a succession of planning sessions. That is not necessarily an inaccurate portrait of publishing. Organizing a clandestine paper would require repeated practical conversations, and the film seems committed to honoring that reality. The challenge is that authenticity of procedure does not automatically produce suspense.
Worthalter gives Marc a combustible center. His performance draws on the indignant force he brought to 2023’s The Goldman Case, again playing a man driven to rage by an unjust system. Marc begins as someone who turns contempt into provocative verse, then has to adapt to the discipline, compromises, and teamwork involved in a dangerous group endeavor. The cast also includes Mélanie Thierry, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, and Damiens. Dialogue is in French and German.
The film’s argument about truth and audience
At its heart, Le Faux Soir proposes that truthful information needs a route into communities that are otherwise insulated from it. Marc’s counterfeit-newspaper idea is built on a simple but challenging question: is it enough to speak truthfully if the people being misled never encounter what you publish?
The historical premise creates an obvious contemporary resonance. A newspaper’s name, typography, delivery pattern, and authority can determine whether readers ever give its contents a chance. The Resistance strategy in the film is therefore not only to write an opposing message; it is to infiltrate a trusted, or at least familiar, container for information.
Still, the comforting implication that exposure to truth will reliably change minds is complicated. Access matters, but audiences do not approach information as blank slates. Political loyalties, fear, habit, identity, and social pressure all shape what people accept or reject. A convincing counterfeit can open a door that an underground title cannot, but it cannot guarantee what happens once the page is read.
There is another tension around the project itself: the present-day newspaper Le Soir is listed as one of the film’s co-producing partners. That connection may be understandable given the historical subject and title, but it inevitably gives the drama an additional layer of self-reflection. A film celebrating the legacy of a publication while examining its wartime appropriation can feel both historically engaged and unusually close to its own institutional subject.
Festival placement and key credits
Le Faux Soir was screened in the Special Presentations program at the Toronto Film Festival on September 10, 2026, and is also set for the closing slot at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Jordan Vanschel served as cinematographer, Nelly Quettier edited the film, and Christophe Chassol composed the score.
For audiences interested in World War II stories outside the usual battlefield template, the film’s focus is clear: resistance is presented as an industrial, editorial, and distribution challenge. Its most unusual images are not of military hardware but of linotypes, rollers, blocks of type, and stacks of papers whose importance depends on where they can go. Le Faux Soir turns the act of getting words printed into the center of the mission—and asks whether control of the format can briefly disrupt control of the message.
