The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro) written and directed by the French filmmaker François Truffaut, will be screened on August 12 at 3 pm and August 13 at 6.30 pm at Alliance Francaise, Barnes Place, Colombo- 7.

Starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu the film received the Best Foreign Film nominations in the Academy Awards and Golden Globes and won ten Césars awards including best film, best actor (Depardieu), best actress (Deneuve), best cinematography, best director (Truffaut), best editing, best music, best production design in 1981.

Set during the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, it tells the story of a Jewish theatre director and his Gentile wife, who struggles to keep him concealed from the Nazis in their cellar while she performs his former job. As in Truffaut's earlier film Jules et Jim, there is a love triangle between the three principal characters: Marion Steiner (Deneuve), her husband Lucas (Heinz Bennent) and Bernard Granger (Depardieu), an actor in the theatre's latest production.

This film was one instalment - dealing with theatre - of a trilogy on the entertainment world that Truffaut had planned. The instalment that dealt with the film world was 1973's La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night). That film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Truffaut completed the screenplay for the third instalment, L'Agence Magique, which would have dealt with the world of Music hall. In the late 1970s he was close to beginning filming, but the failure of his film The Green Room forced him to look to a more commercial project, and he filmed Love on the Run instead.