Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion is a 1937 French film directed by Jean Renoir, following a group of French officers held in a series of German prisoner of war camps during the First World War and their attempts to escape, centered on the shifting class and national loyalties among the prisoners and their captors. Alongside its war setting the film is concerned above all with the collapse of an old European aristocratic order, dramatized through the friendship between a French aristocrat officer and his German captor, a fellow nobleman, as both sense their shared class becoming obsolete. It became the first foreign language film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of French cinema; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels denounced it as Cinematic Public Enemy Number One and ordered prints destroyed for its anti-war message.