Entertainment

Baudry's Two-Part De Gaulle Epic Wins Top Audience Prize in Los Angeles

Jonah VillalbaPublished 3m ago2 min readBased on 9 sources
Baudry's Two-Part De Gaulle Epic Wins Top Audience Prize in Los Angeles
Photo by Office of War Information, Overseas Picture Division. [1] The image prefix (LC-USW3) at the Library of Congress image page matches that of pictures from the OWI collection (see prefix list here. / Public domain

Antonin Baudry's two-part World War II epic De Gaulle has won the top audience prize at the American French Film Festival in Los Angeles, according to Variety.

The prize closed the festival's 30th anniversary edition, which ran from 3 to 8 November at the DGA theatre complex on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The festival's official name for the award is the TAFFF30 Audience Feature Award. Organisers say more than 18,000 people attended this year's edition.

The film stars Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill. Antonin Baudry wrote it with Bérénice Vila. The two parts screened back to back on Saturday, 7 November, to packed theatres, and the audience gave it a seven-minute standing ovation. Festival guests also received free bites and drinks during the intermission.

The screenings were the film's first U.S. showing as a special event. Its wider American rollout is now underway. Samuel Goldwyn Films is releasing De Gaulle in the United States. The first part, titled De Gaulle: Resistance, opened in U.S. theatres and on transactional video-on-demand (the kind of pay-per-view rental or purchase you make from a streaming menu) over the same weekend. The second part, De Gaulle: Liberty, is set for early December.

On the international side, Pathé has sold the film to China for a wide release. Variety reports that it is also playing in the United Kingdom as the highest-grossing French film of 2026 so far.

The festival itself was a large undertaking. The 30th anniversary lineup included 31 fiction features, 11 series, four documentaries and 14 shorts, with new films starring Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux and Isabelle Huppert among them. The festival bills itself as the only American festival dedicated to French films and series, which makes an audience prize there a useful signal for distributors looking at what American viewers will turn out for.

For anyone who wants to see the film, the calendar is now clear. Part one is in cinemas and on rental platforms, and part two arrives in December.

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