DAYTON — No celebrities will step from limos to stride across a red carpet when a new film made in Dayton has its premiere at the Schuster Center tonight, Aug. 19.

There will be a white GMC Envoy parked on the plaza outside at Second and Main streets.

It’s the vehicle in the title of “The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant,” a documentary by award-winning Yellow Springs filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert that focuses on the workers who lost their jobs.

Home Box Office, which produced it and will broadcast it on Labor Day, Sept. 7, is presenting the premiere for former GM workers and the general public. Admission is free, but reservations are required for the event. Doors open at 6 p.m. The 40-minute film will be shown at 6:30.

Other sponsors are FilmDayton and Wright State University.

Working with HBO is a milestone for Bognar and Reichert, whose many previous films including “A Lion in the House” (2006) have been made independently.

“But it’s hard to feel excited knowing that this is about a tragedy in people’s lives. It’s a story of pain, sadness and loss for America’s blue-collar workers. It’s an elegy,” said Reichert, a professor of film at Wright State University.

There also are smiles and laughs in the film. “It’s not a pity party,” said Bognar, an alumnus of WSU. “It’s a tribute. It’s about what it means to lose a job you love. It was a surprise to us how much these people cared. They had a lot of pride.”

The filmmakers also were hoping to have the first truck made at the plant, a compact Chevrolet pickup, on display in the Wintergarden of the Schuster Center. HBO plans to take an aerial “GM family photo” there after the film, at about 8 p.m. Anyone who has ever worked at the Moraine plant in any capacity is encouraged to be in it.

More than 40 people are interviewed in the film, which begins shortly after GM announced it was closing the Moraine plant and continues through the last day — two days before Christmas 2008.

One of the workers interviewed for the film, former forklift operator Kate Geiger, said it’s “exciting and scary” to be part of a film that will be shown nationally. “It’s way bigger than me. Now it has a life of its own. It’s very poignant that somebody cared about us that much to make this movie.”

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