Le Faux Soir

November 1943. Belgium is suffering under German occupation, and the newspaper Le Soir has been seized by the Nazis as a propaganda channel. When even the commemoration of Armistice Day is banned, a group of Brussels resistance fighters gathered around the anarchist poet Marc 'Yvon' Aubrion (Arieh Worthalter) hatch a wild plan. They will produce their own edition of Le Soir: the same paper, the same title, the same layout, but with articles that mercilessly expose the occupier. To get their forgery into the kiosks alongside the real newspapers, they must find paper, printing presses and accomplices in the space of just a few weeks. One slip could cost them their lives.

With Le Faux Soir, Michaël R. Roskam unearths an almost forgotten chapter of Belgian history. The director of Bullhead (2011) casts this resistance operation as a tense heist film, in which improvisation and Brussels wit become just as important as courage. Arieh Worthalter leads an impressive Belgian-French ensemble that includes Mélanie Thierry, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, Julien Frison and François Damiens. No bullets, but printer's ink: here, humour becomes a weapon against a regime trying to tighten its grip on reality through propaganda.

It is precisely there that Roskam finds the urgency of this story, which has almost vanished from collective memory. Le Faux Soir is not just about resistance against an occupier, but about who controls information and, in doing so, determines what people accept as true. The technology has changed; the battle over the narrative has not. What began in 1943 with a handful of resistance fighters and a forged front page grew into one of the most spectacular actions in Belgium's clandestine press. With Le Faux Soir, Film Fest Gent closes its 53rd edition with a gripping ode to the power of words, humour and imagination – and a reminder that the fight for the truth is never entirely won.