Thursday, April 30 – 7pm

Lumière! Le Cinema!

Documentary • France • 2025
106 Minutes

Synopsis: This French documentary is an engrossing, definitive look at the birth of cinema. It’s also about the very filmmakers Savoy Lumière is named after.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts; some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen films directed by Lumière and company.

In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic micro-documentaries as well as the first-ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious (re)telling of the genesis of cinema, but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Director: Thierry Frémaux
Writer: Thierry Frémaux
Producers: Maelle Arnaud, Nathanaël Karmitz
Editor: Jonathan Cayssials, Simon Gemelli
Composer: Gabiel Fauré