LUMIERE AND COMPANY

What do you get when you take 40 of the world's leading directors, give them a 100-year-old camera that must be hand-cranked, limit them to the original one-reel length of homemade film-stock (52 seconds) with no synchronous sound, and tell them they can only use natural light? You get LUMIERE AND COMPANY, a collaboration piece organized by Philippe Poulet, a reseacher at teh Lyon Cinema Museum. LUMIERE AND COMPANY celebrates the centennial of the cinema by putting Lumiere's original (reconditioned) camera into the hands of 40 of the world's foremost filmmakers including John Boorman, Costa-Gavras, Peter Greenaway, Merchant-Ivory, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Liv Ullmann, Wim Wenders, and Zhang Yimou. The results of their efforts, and the accompanying interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, demonstrate taht even though cinema technology has changed drastically in the last 100 years, the art of expression via the moving image remains wonderfully vital. In English, and various languages with English subtitles. – Jeffrey Dollinger