Sometimes the fastest way to decide on a holiday destination is a good film. The Good Life France has pulled together a watchlist — curated with the streaming service France Channel — of French movies and documentaries that double as armchair travel, from sunbaked Provence to the château-studded Loire Valley.
The fiction picks cover a lot of ground. Knock (2017) stars Omar Sy as a reformed conman posing as a doctor in a 1950s village, all narrow streets, old shops and small-town gossip. Marcel Pagnol fans get a double bill with My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle (both 1990), which evoke early 20th-century Provence so vividly you can practically hear the cicadas — rosemary-scented hillsides, stone houses with blue shutters, long summer evenings. For mountain scenery there's Belle and Sebastian: Next Generation (2022), following a ten-year-old boy and a Pyrenean mountain dog through towering peaks and forest trails. Villa Caprice (2020) is a legal thriller set around a luxury villa on the Riviera, while the oddball comedy Naked Normandy (2018) has an American photographer persuading villagers in rural Normandy to pose au naturel — with farmhouse dreams and village-market charm as the backdrop.
If you're weighing up a move or just want to pick a region for your next trip, the documentaries may be the more useful half of the list. Stéphane Bern's The Favourite Village of the French tours impossibly pretty villages — cobbled lanes, honey-coloured houses, flower-filled squares — and is a good way to find places beyond the usual hotspots. Culinary Road Trip digs into regional food traditions and local producers (French gastronomy is UNESCO-listed, after all). There's also 100 Must See Places: Wonders of the Southwest for medieval villages and vineyards, Beautiful Getaway: The Loire for castles and riverside towns, and Paris, The City of Lights for the café terraces, boulangeries and hidden courtyards.
Everything streams on France Channel, a service dedicated to French film, TV and documentaries, available in the UK and US. An annual subscription costs £69.99 in the UK or $79.99 in the US ($8.99 monthly in the US), with a 30% discount currently available using code 30GLFUK. You can watch on the web, Android TV, Apple TV, or via the iOS and Android apps, and it's also sold through Amazon Prime Video Channels (plus Roku, Xumo and Xfinity in the US).
Who's this for? Anyone in the trip-planning stage who wants inspiration before booking. It's an easy, low-cost way to road-test regions: if Pagnol's Provence hooks you, look at the Luberon; if the Loire documentary wins, base yourself near Amboise or Tours. Fair warning from the source itself — real life in France involves bureaucracy the films leave out — but the markets, wine and general art de vivre tend to make up for it.
