Lumière, Le Cinéma!

Thierry Frémaux guides viewers through more than a hundred early shorts by the Lumière brothers, tracing how their cinematograph gave birth to cinema as both record and imagination.

This documentary celebrates Auguste and Louis Lumière, whose pioneering camera helped launch the art of film over 130 years ago. Directed by Thierry Frémaux of the Institut Lumière, it presents a wealth of shorts—celebrated, obscure and previously unseen—showing how the brothers and their operators developed framing, staging and storytelling. Featuring appearances from figures such as Francis Ford Coppola and Bertrand Tavernier, it is both a history of cinema's origins and a reflection on the world the Lumières captured on screen.