Le Faux Soir Sets 2027 Launch as Roskam’s Nazi Paper Hack Hits TIFF

Frakas Productions and Rectangle Productions have dated a January 27, 2027 Belgian and French theatrical launch for Michaël R. Roskam’s Le Faux Soir. Roskam’s Nazi-occupation heist thriller, starring Arieh Worthalter and Mélanie Thierry, closed San Sebastián after a TIFF special presentation.

The picture arrives with an unusually clean festival runway for a French-language period title. TIFF handed it a special presentation slot; San Sebastián programmed it out of competition as the closing film; and the Belgian-French co-production structure (Frakas out of Brussels, Rectangle out of Paris, with Goodfellas handling international) gives distributors a prestige corridor running straight into a European winter play.

“Le Faux Soir is a heist film, an act of courage and unbelievable resistance, doubled by a political dimension, in the manner of Spike Lee’s Inside Man or Jules Dassin’s Rififi, with heroism, humor, tragedy. What I’m going to show won’t be reality, but a truth.”
— Michaël R. Roskam, Director and Co-Writer (translated from French)

The 1943 Sting That Beat the Occupiers at Their Own Presses

The screenplay drops into November 1943, when occupying authorities banned Armistice commemorations and effectively dared Brussels to stay quiet. Members of the Front de l’Indépendance answered with a forgery: a counterfeit edition of the Nazi-controlled daily Le Soir, matched on masthead, paper stock, column rules and typeface, then stuffed with satirical copy mocking the occupiers. Distribution was the whole game. The paper had to look authentic for exactly long enough to move through kiosks, trams and factory floors before the Germans understood what they were holding.

Roskam knows the newsroom mechanics from the inside; he worked as a journalist at De Morgen before turning to film. His ensemble reflects a deliberate national mosaic, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, Julien Frison, François Damiens, Jean-Benoît Ugeux, Ruth Becquart, Viviane De Muynck, Jan Bijvoet and Peter Van den Begin. Worthalter stepped into the lead as resistance operative Marc “Yvon” Aubrion, taking over the role after Matthias Schoenaerts exited the package. The director has described the casting mandate bluntly: a cast that looks like the Belgium he loves.

Why the Co-Production Math Works in Prestige Theatrical

Roskam’s commercial credibility is not theoretical. Bullhead landed an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, The Drop put him on a Hollywood footing, and the Black Bird limited series gave him a streaming pedigree. Le Faux Soir operates at a reported budget in the €13, 15 million range, a contained number that a strong Belgian-French theatrical run plus a premium TV sale can clear, provided the awards conversation holds through the winter.

Notably, Rossel, the parent group behind Le Soir itself, is involved in the production. That is an unusual piece of corporate consent: the newspaper that was hijacked in 1943 is now financing the film about the hijacking. The theatrical date is set, yet no full trailer has been dated by the distributors, and the campaign has leaned almost entirely on festival unveilings so far. Expect the marketing push to convert the San Sebastián closing slot into a French-speaking market launch before widening through Benelux and select European territories in early 2027.