Some of the world's greatest filmmakers accepted Sarah Moon and Philippe Poulet's challenge and took an original Lumière hand-cranked camera to make 52 second films using only homemade film stock (from the brother's original recipe with the addition of a safety feature as early films were highly flammable), natural lighting and no synchronized sound to pay tribute to the brothers Lumiere and to celebrate the "First Century of Cinema." Sarah Moon helmed the enormous project and provided the continuity between segments while Poulet, an associate in the Museum of Cinema, located in Besancon, France. Once the project was set in motion, art director Ann Andreu went to 150 directors, 39 were able to do it. These directors come from the world over and include such US helmers as David Lynch and Spike Lee. Other directors include Costa-Gavras, Merchant and Ivory, Jacques Rivette, Liv Ulmann, Kiju Yoshida, and Andrei Konchalovsky. The directors made their films all around the world... Great conception!!!!
Most of the directors in the project have tried to keep their films in the spirit of the Lumiere films, and succeed quite nicely. Patrice Leconte, in face, goes to the same railway station in La Ciotat where the Lumieres filmed a train arriving at the station, and sets his camera in the same spot to record the arrival of a train a hundred years later -subsequently proving that sooner or later, everything gets remade.
