Presented in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Our salvation Emmanuel Marre's film was awarded the Best Screenplay Prize. Set for release on September 30, 2026, the film revisits the early days of the Vichy regime from a unique perspective: that of a civil servant convinced he was contributing to the country's reconstruction, without immediately grasping the full implications of his actions. Starring Swann Arlaud, among others, the story explores how the ordinary administration became a cog in the machine of collaboration.
An ordinary civil servant at the heart of the Vichy machine
The story follows Henri Marre, an engineer of limited success who arrives in Vichy in the aftermath of the 1940 defeat. Driven by a mixture of personal ambition and technical patriotism, he believes he can contribute to "rationalizing" public action in the new French state. He joins an administrative department responsible for employment management, which gradually becomes involved in mechanisms for controlling and sorting the population.
The film depicts the rise of this bureaucratic machine through everyday actions: filling out forms, following instructions, organizing travel. Without resorting to dramatic effects, Emmanuel Marre focuses on portraying an administrative logic that takes hold step by step, where each decision initially appears neutral before becoming part of a broader system of persecution and exclusion.
A present-day staging to depict the banality of evil
The filmmaker adopts a documentary-like approach, favoring a sense of simultaneity with the events. The camera follows the characters closely, in often lengthy scenes where the time of action merges with the time of decision. This aesthetic aims to convey the protagonists' uncertainty, as they move forward without knowing the outcome of the story they are nevertheless helping to write.
This formal choice reinforces one of the film's central themes: showing how ordinary individuals, convinced they are acting within the bounds of their mission, can contribute to the establishment of a criminal system without any dramatic disruption. By awarding the screenplay, the Cannes jury praised a narrative that rejects Manichaeism and highlights the slow descent of an administration confronted with its own justifications.
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