About the film

Everyone knows the image of the rocket in the eye of the moon. But where does it come from? Filmed in 1902, 6 years after the invention of cinema, by Georges Méliès (one of the heroes of Scorsese’ film “Hugo Cabret”), “A Trip To The Moon” was the first blockbuster in the history of cinema, but it has been forgotten ever since. In 1993, the discovery of a print of the film “In Colour” is the start of the most sophisticated and expensive restoration in the history of cinema: 12 years of work, the latest technologies involved, a multi-national plan for an impossible resurrection.

This fascinating documentary chronicles the recent restoration of Georges Méliès’ fantastical “A Trip to the Moon” to its original 1902 colors - from film archivists Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange of Lobster Films acquiring a severely damaged color print in 1999, to the tedious task of peeling off and unrolling the nitrate prints in order to digitize them, to the two-year process of discovering the images on those fragments, to the eight-year wait for technology to become available for Lobster Films to access the images on the digitized hard drive. Includes interviews with contemporary filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Michel Gondry, Michel Hazanavicius and Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Méliès’ enduring significance to cinema.

Wybrane nagrody i festiwale /Selected festivals and awards: 2011 - MFF Cannes/Cannes IFF