Matt Pokora, the French singer who recently joined the panel of coaches on "The Voice Kids," is moving into acting with the lead role in "Oradour," a new television drama from broadcaster TF1 that mixes romance with the historical events surrounding the 1944 massacre in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The film also stars actress Caroline Anglade and is scheduled to air on TF1 in late September 2026.
Pokora plays Philippe Gerbier, an officer with the Free French Forces who is parachuted into the area near Oradour-sur-Glane on 5 June 1944, five days before the massacre, according to TF1's description of the plot. His character is given a secret mission that the broadcaster describes as crucial for the Resistance in the days before the Allied landings in Normandy. Once there, Gerbier reunites with Marie, played by Anglade, a childhood love who is fleeing a violent husband with her young daughter.
The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane
On 10 June 1944, the SS Das Reich division killed 643 residents of Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in the Haute-Vienne department of central France. Nearly 450 women and children were locked inside the village church, machine-gunned and burned alive. The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane have since been preserved as a memorial site, and the village is often referred to in France as a "village martyr," or martyred village.
An idea born in the ruins
According to TF1, the idea for the fiction took shape in 2022, when Pokora met Robert Hébras, one of the last survivors of the massacre, during a visit to the ruins of the village. The broadcaster described the singer's approach as sincere, saying that the memory of the tragedy has to endure and that Pokora and the production team chose to keep it alive through a fiction centred on a small, personal story set against the larger history of the war.
Concerns from local officials
The project caused concern among local authorities in the summer of 2025 over how the history would be handled on screen. Benoît Sadry, president of the Association nationale des familles des martyrs (ANFM), the National Association of Families of Martyrs, and a deputy mayor of Oradour-sur-Glane, said that in September 2025 the association met the production team, the screenwriter and Pokora himself in Oradour-sur-Glane, and that they addressed families directly to answer their questions.
After that meeting, Sadry said, the association came to understand that the overall course of the massacre had been portrayed accurately and in keeping with what actually happened. He added that some liberties had nonetheless been taken for the needs of the fiction, and said the association had pushed hard for a message to appear at the start of the film warning viewers that it is not a true story.
Sadry said the association's main worry was over how the history would be treated, since Oradour-sur-Glane is already a target for Holocaust deniers and revisionists, and there was a fear that the fiction could, in one way or another, give them material to use.
Reaching a younger audience
The drama will be followed immediately after broadcast by a documentary starting at 11:15pm that will revisit the massacre from a historical angle and give voice to victims' families. The fiction itself was not filmed in Oradour-sur-Glane but on reconstructed sets in a studio in Belgium.
Philippe Lacroix, the mayor of Oradour-sur-Glane, who has worked closely with the ANFM throughout the project, said the production team's approach was sincere. He said it was important to raise awareness of the subject, particularly among a younger public that may not be fully informed about the tragedy.
A massacre without a resistance network
Ahead of the film's release, Sadry wanted to stress a point he said the fiction may not necessarily address: Oradour-sur-Glane had no resistance network, which he said is one of the reasons the massacre is so difficult to understand. He described it as a gratuitous massacre, carried out at a decisive moment of the Second World War during the Allied landings, with the aim of terrorising the French population and discouraging people from turning to the Resistance.
