From Port of Shadows to Goupi Mains Rouges (It Happened at the Inn), by way of La Bandera and The Murder of Father Christmas, Robert Le Vigan was one of the legendary supporting actors of French cinema. An actor with a poetic, inspired, almost hallucinatory brand of street-smart wit, he defied classification. The best friend of the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, he went astray into collaboration during the Second World War, and was sentenced to ten years in prison at the Liberation. He would end his days in exile in South America.

Drawing on previously unseen documents, including a never-broadcast interview with Robert Le Vigan filmed in Argentina in 1970, the film uses his story to tell the dark side of French history: the rise of antisemitism, collaboration, artistic life under the Occupation, the pathetic saga of Sigmaringen and its puppet government, the purge, and more. Robert Le Vigan, or the story of a man’s slide down the wrong slope of history.