La Grande Illusion is a film directed by celebrated French director Jean Renoir, who himself had fought in the war. Since its release in 1937, it has become a widely celebrated movie on humanity in the face of violence.

Renoir's classic is not a movie about a prison escape, nor is it jingoistic in its politics; it's a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. The 'grand illusion' of Renoir's title is the notion that the upper classes somehow stand above war as they send the 'commoners' to the trenches as mere cannon-fodder. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behaviour. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War One.

The film will be introduced by Dr Daniel Laqua from the Histories of Activism Research Group at Northumbria University.