4K RESTORATION
Man-of-the-people Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) teams up with Jewish aristocrat Lieutenant Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) to escape a World War I German POW camp run by Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim).The film, inspired by director Jean Renoir’s own wartime experiences, is both a tribute to the brotherhood of man and an elegy for a fading aristocracy. Internationally acclaimed, Grand Illusion was the first foreign film nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, also winning awards at the Venice Film Festival and from the New York Film Critics Circle.
Long acknowledged as one of the world’s great classics, Grand Illusion was once believed lost after its camera negative was seized by the Nazis in 1940 and later taken by the Red Army in 1945. Unknown even to its director, the negative resurfaced decades later, unnoticed on a shelf in Toulouse following a film exchange between French and Soviet archives in the 1960s. Eventually transferred to the French State Film Archive in the late 1990s, it underwent its first restoration in 1999 by Canal+ Image (now Studiocanal). A second restoration in 2011 used advanced 4K digitization and sound technology, preserving the nitrate negative's remarkable condition and enhancing its audio quality.