Lumière Festival

The Lumière film festival celebrated its 10th birthday in Lyon, France and did so one year ahead of the 125th anniversary of the invention of cinema itself by its namesake brothers in this very town, in 1894. The idea behind the Thierry Frémaux-directed festival is, in fact, to celebrate film in the very birthplace of the medium: the workshop where the two industrialist brothers developed the first camera capable of producing moving images still stands and is now part of the Lumière Institute complex housing screening facilities, an archive, book store and the stately Lumière mansion which today houses the Lumière museum and doubles as festival headquarters (future plans also include a larger, more modern, Renzo Piano-designed cinema museum to be built).

Long lines snaked around the Lumière Institute theater, buzzing with anticipation for the upcoming screening. You would have been hard-pressed to guess that the excitement was for a 1926 silent film – but that is the Lumière Festival in a nutshell.

The Festival Lumière is celebrating its tenth anniversary as the world's premiere festival devoted to classic films. Held in Lyon every October, the festival is an homage to films as art as well as cherished objects or collective memory.