Carnival in Flanders is a 1935 French historical romantic comedy film directed by Jacques Feyder, and created during the poetic realism period in 1930s France.

Fearing that this will inevitably result in rape and pillage, the mayor — supported by his town council — has the idea of pretending to be newly dead, in order to avoid receiving the soldiers.

But his redoubtable wife Cornelia despises this stratagem and organises the other women to prepare hospitality and to adapt their carnival entertainments for the Spaniards (who insist on entering the town anyway).

Cornelia allows her husband to take the credit for their good fortune, but she has in the meantime thwarted his plans for their daughter to marry the town butcher instead of the young painter Brueghel whom she loves.

Carnival in Flanders / La Kermesse héroïque was made by Jacques Feyder immediately after his dark psychological drama Pension Mimosas, and he said that he wanted to relax by making a farce, far removed from the present day.

For the visual style of the film, Feyder wanted to pay tribute to the old masters of his native country — Brueghel, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh — and an elaborate creation of a Flemish town was undertaken (in suburban Paris) by the designer Lazare Meerson.

That allowed me to gather a number of documents in advance, and so I was able, in six weeks, not only make my four hundred models, but choose the fabrics to perform them.”[3] Production designer Lazare Meerson was put in charge of creating the setting for the film.

Meerson took care in building the set from scratch, and, as The National Board of Review Magazine notes, he was able to elegantly contrive an atmosphere true to a 17th century Flanders.

[6] The scale and detail of the set was achieved by Feyder and Meerson’s insistence to their German financial backers, which led them to dig a canal through the center the Epinay Studios.

[10] In conjunction to Stradling’s use of shots emphasizing the scale, Meerson’s set combines the architecture of the time such as the church spires to provide a large feeling of the town of Boom.

On the strength of its richly detailed tableaux and the confident manner in which Feyder animated his historical farce, the film enjoyed considerable success in France and elsewhere in the world.

[13] Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a good review, praising director Feyder for his ability to add "into his ribald story a touch of the genuine, and simple emotion".

(Yet, a few days after the outbreak of war in 1939, the film was banned in Germany and the occupied countries of Europe, and Jacques Feyder and Françoise Rosay subsequently sought refuge in Switzerland.

)[15] It was in Belgium that the film caused greatest controversy, perhaps for the unflattering portrayal of Flemish leaders in the 17th century, or in suspicion of covert references to the German occupation of Belgian territory during the First World War.