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  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
    • Gunga Din
    • A Hard Day's Night: Influences on the Movie
    • Hemingway & Gellhorn >
      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
    • Marie-Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine
    • Farewell, My Queen
    • Marie Antoinette (1938) >
      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
    • Midnight in Paris >
      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
    • North West Frontier / Flame Over India
    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
    • Pompeii in the movies >
      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
    • Ridicule
    • Scott Fitzgerald Goes to Hollywood
    • Sergeant Rutledge
    • Silence of the Sea
    • Swing Kids (1993)
    • The Train
    • Train to Pakistan
    • Stranglers of Bombay
    • Tonka
    • Tulip Fever
    • Viceroy's House
    • The Vikings
    • Vietnam Westerns: western movies and the Vietnam war
    • Wee Willie Winkie
    • The Wind and the Lion
    • Woman in Gold >
      • Woman in Gold Pt.2: the Vienna Scene in early 20th Century Vienna
    • Un village française: French TV series
    • Waterloo: the movie about Napoleon's final battle
    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
    • Movies Set in Paris and Versailles
  • Events
    • Events That Inspired Movies 2
    • French Resistance and Collaboration in World War II: Selected Movies
  • People
    • People Part 2
  • Music
    • Rock Around the Clock
    • Don't Knock the Rock
    • The Girl Can't Help It >
      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie
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"... living is making choices". This popular TV series looks at how fictional villagers respond to German Occupation.
With a few brave exceptions, French film-makers took decades before they were prepared to make movies about the responses of  ordinary French people to German Occupation.  It took over six decades before this still controversial topic became the subject of a major French TV series: Un village française. The series, which is meant to run for five years, devotes each season to a year during the Occupation, starting from June,1940. It is intended to film almost sixty episodes, ending with Liberation and its impact on the village. The series focuses on the inhabitants of the small rura fictional village of Villeneuve in Vichy-controlled eastern France  as they decide how they will deal with the various problems and dilemmas they face as a result of the Occupation and its moral and political impact. These issues occur against a backdrop of scarcity and  social and economic disruption.  Un village français' producer claimed the show's "intention was to bring out those 95% of the French people who were neither Resistance fighters nor collaborators."

The production has several interesting features. One is lifted from the HBO productions The Pacific and Band of Brothers : each episode concludes with historical footage and interviews with French people who recollect their lives and attitudes during the Occupation. Another is its emphasis on the gradually changing mood of the villagers as they gradually realise the implications of Occupation and their impact on personal and  family  relationships.

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Later episodes of the series look at the rounding up and expulsion of Jews from the village of Villeneuve, and the reactions of the inhabitants.
The director of photography for the first season, Therry Jault, examined several seminal films about the Occupation in order to decide on the particular 'look' he wanted to give Un village francaise. These included the desaturated imagery of Melville's Army of Shadows and the semi-documentary black-and-white style of Réne Clément's La bataille du rail. Jault claimed that the series "analyses human behaviour in the terrible situation experienced in France."
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A crucial character in the series is Daniel Larcher, the village doctor whom the German kommandant of the region (above left) manipulates into becoming Villeneuve's mayor and faces the dilema of having to implement poilcies he finds distasteful while trying to protect the village from the consequences of arousing German anger.  His young nephew (above right, centre) is the son of a Communist, Marcel Larcher,  determined to resist the Germans by force 
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Lucienne Borderies, a school teacher in the village, provides the focus for the fraught subject of relationships between women in Villeneuve and German soldiers stationed in the area. 

Villeneuve - significance of the fictional village's name?

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Significantly, the picturesque village was the home town of Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy government during World War 2. It was also the site of a battle between German troops and the French First Special Force in 1944. Almost 50 years later the bodies of fourteen German soldiers killed in the fighting were discovered in a mass grave.
MOVIES ABOUT  OCCUPATION & FRENCH RESISTANCE