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Although often considered Jewish, the French film director and theorist Jean Epstein was Catholic. His Jewish origins can be traced back to his paternal grandfather, also named Jean, a Polish industrialist who converted to Protestantism and married a Swiss Protestant, Élise Kleber. Their son, Jules Epstein, married Hélène Marie Rompel, a Polish Catholic. This union gave birth in Warsaw to the future filmmaker, Jean, in 1897, and his sister Marie in 1899, who herself became a screenwriter and director, and whose work for the archives of the Cinémathèque française was of prime importance. Jean Epstein’s career, marked by major works such as Cœur fidèle (1923), La Belle Nivernaise (1924) and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928), was brutally interrupted by the Occupation. Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation kept him away from his professional environment, dispossessed him of his films and plundered his entire estate. Following Jean Epstein’s career during the Occupation provides an opportunity to examine the way in which the film industry, and also the film training institutions, zealously applied the policy of “racial” exclusion decided by Vichy.