Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou is one of the great prison escape films, and a profound meditation on freedom and confinement which "exists in the same spiritual screen realm as La Grand Illusion and Bresson's A Man Escaped." (Telluride Film Festival '96) It has us rooting as never before for the success of its protagonists, all convicts of varying degrees of toughness attempting a prison breakout. Becker painstakingly establishes the contained world of four prisoners-and then adds a fifth. Suddenly, everything revolves around the newcomer: will he or won't he go along with the escape plan? In this film, perhaps more than any other (see Casque d'or, December 22), Becker has attempted what he might have called a "true" film: he achieves a totally engrossing tale through an extreme of realistic detail. Le Trou is based on the autobiographical novel of Jose Giovanni, one of the participants of an actual escape attempt from Santé prison in 1947; one of Giovanni's cellmates, Jean Keraudy, appears in the film.