Antonin Baudry's biopic De Gaulle: Résistance, the first of two planned films, offers a warm and often wryly comic portrait of Charles de Gaulle during his years as the exiled leader of Free France in London. Based on Julian Jackson's biography A Certain Idea of France, the film centres on De Gaulle's charged, affectionate rivalry-turned-alliance with Winston Churchill, played with relish by Simon Russell Beale, and treats its imperious hero with amused but sympathetic detachment.

Simon Abkarian plays De Gaulle with theatrical hauteur opposite Beale's Churchill, with much of their dialogue delivered in French. The film covers De Gaulle's arrival in Britain after France's 1940 collapse, the deadly 1940 British bombing of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir that killed nearly 1,300 French sailors, and his efforts to rally support in French Africa, before culminating in the Free French stand at Bir Hakeim under General Kœnig against Rommel's forces, setting up a second instalment.