In early 1960, the Mat Pilote became a film set. Director Claude Autant-Lara chose it as one of the primary locations for Le Bois des Amants (Lovers’ Wood, also released as Between Love and Duty), filming here from January 22 to March 18.
The film tells a wartime story both tragic and tender: Christmas Eve, 1943. Herta von Stauffen, a German military woman, arrives in occupied Brittany hoping to spend the holiday with her husband, a Wehrmacht officer. When he cannot leave his post, she is billeted in the isolated home of a French widow—whose son is a Resistance fighter, freshly parachuted from London to guide an RAF bombing raid.
What unfolds is an impossible love between enemies, set against the very landscape our grandfather Kikli knew during the Resistance. The Breton coast, the isolated houses, the tension between occupier and occupied—all of it filmed here at Le Pouldu, Quimperlé, and the Mat Pilote itself.
The film starred Laurent Terzieff as the partisan and Erika Remberg as the German wife, with the formidable Françoise Rosay as the intransigent Breton mother. The film captured something essential about wartime Brittany: the moral complexity, the isolation, the impossible choices.
Sixty-five years later, the Mat Pilote still stands where Autant-Lara’s cameras filmed it. The same promontory, the same granite walls, the same convergence of coast and history. Cinema recognized what artists always have: this place holds stories worth telling.