Cinema
Soldiers without Uniforms
Soldats sans uniforme
Émile-Georges De Meyst · 1944
Synopsis
Under the German occupation, a group of Belgian resistance fighters has made a castle its liaison centre. Helped by an intelligence agent, they carry on their clandestine struggle and hide English airmen who must get back to London. A spy in the service of the occupier manages to infiltrate them, with the mission of extracting intelligence from them, and the network has to guard itself from within as much as from without.
Context
Shooting began in secret in July 1944, in a studio in Etterbeek, while the occupier was still there. The director said he was preparing documentaries, and he had devised with his screenwriter René Herdé, who also plays the lead role, a cover plot, an ordinary affair of smugglers, to deceive the Gestapo. The film was released on 14 December 1944 at the Métropole cinema in Brussels, three months after the liberation of the city, and it was a great popular success.
Who it is for
A fiction feature film of about a hundred minutes, in French, on the Belgian internal resistance.
Prizes and reception
The first Belgian film devoted to the Second World War, and one of the first in Europe to show the Resistance.
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