A Man of His Time

Emmanuel Marre's Notre salut played in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026 and won the Best Screenplay prize. Marre had previously co-directed the well-received Zero Fucks Given (2021) with Julie Lecoustre. This is his most ambitious solo feature, a 155-minute French-Belgian production that reaches into one of the most uncomfortable corners of twentieth-century French history.

Henri Marre, a man of forty-nine, arrives in Vichy with no money and no connections, carrying a self-published political treatise that sets out his patriotic convictions and his engineer's certainties. In the collaborationist administration he sees the chance to become, at last, someone who matters. Swann Arlaud plays him without caricature and without excuses, and Marre treats the period as a study of ordinary ambition curdling into complicity, with none of the trappings of costume spectacle.

Its focus on a minor functionary, far from the architects of the regime, puts Notre salut in a line of French cinema, running from Lacombe, Lucien onward, that examines collaboration through small, recognisable men. Cannes received it well: alongside the screenplay prize it collected the Art et Essai award and a technical citation. The film is restrained and lucid, and its judgement of Henri is all the more damning for being delivered so calmly. Marre is one of the more serious new voices in Francophone cinema.