A tribute to the Lumière brothers and the birth of cinema

One of the international film community’s most distinguished and dynamic figures, Thierry Frémaux will be in Athens for just one night as a guest of the Hellenic Film Academy and the Onassis Stegi. The Greek director Panos H. Koutras will also be taking part in the presentation.

Thierry Frémaux, General Director of the Cannes Film Festival since 2007, is undoubtedly one of the most influential and significant figures in film internationally. Artistic Director at Cannes since 2004, he started his career as a volunteer at the Institut Lumière in Lyon. Having been appointed artistic director of the Institut under Bertrand Tavernier(he remains its director to this day), he was subsequently invited by the President of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob, to take on the same role at the Festival. Now indivisible from the Festival, Frémaux still presides over the process whereby films are selected to participate at Cannes,, setting the tone for the Festival, guiding its development and remaining its most charismatic representative. Omnipresent during the Festival itself, exuding enthusiasm and energy, Thierry Frémaux has managed in just a few short years to impart a new vibrancy on one of the oldest and most important festivals on the planet, and to make Cannes the epicentre of a dynamic, contemporary and up-to-date cinema.

A philhellene and an impassioned supported of Greek film, by selecting Greek films for all the Festival’s programmes, he has played an active role in the international success Greek film has enjoyed in recent years.

His visit to Greece on the 120th anniversary of the birth of film and the Lumière Brothers’ first films marks an ideal start for the Greek film year.

Thierry Frémaux will present “Lumière!”, a compilation of 98 conserved and restored films which Louis Lumière and his cameramen made between 1895 and 1905, along with a commentary specially tailored to its Greek audience.

In 1895, the Lumière Brothers invented the Cinématographe (a device for capturing, developing and projecting films) and went on to film some of the first moving images in the history of cinema. “Workers leaving the Lumière factory, The sprinkler sprinkled...”

Their staging of a scene, their use of travelling shots and special effects all reveal the art of film making. The compilation consists of almost 100 short films ranging from world-famous masterpieces to less well-known gems, all fully restored in 4K in honour of the Lumière Brothers’ bequest to Mankind: Unforgettable images and a glimpse of France and the world in the early 20th century.