Chronicles of the cultural life of Tashkent (2007 – 2015). From the murder of Mark Weil to the wedding of Alisher Usmanov. Tashkent Biennale, apartment buildings, video art festival, conversations about nothing, amateur performances and operational shooting, advertising and much more. Tashkent, which no longer exists, just as these people are no longer in it.

Having gone to Samarkand in search of traces of colonial culture, of which there were quite a few left there, having carefully photographed them, we suddenly discovered that it was not the dead buildings that were much more interesting, but the living carriers of this very colonial culture. The result is a film about people who live on the ruins of an empire.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

A walk through the life and work of the brilliant French filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861-1938), pioneer of special and visual effects.

Throughout the 19th century, imaginative and visionary artists and inventors brought about the advent of a new look, absolutely modern and truly cinematographic, long before the revolutionary invention of the Lumière brothers and the arrival of December 28, 1895, the historic day on which the first cinema performance took place.

"Iwa Wanja - Kissed by Fate, Forgotten by Everyone", is dedicated to the German film star with Bulgarian roots Ivanka Janakieva. The actress's life is full of twists, dramas and blows of fate, and her remarkable film career makes her the only Bulgarian woman with a name in European cinema from its silent period.

The epic life story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), a French screenwriter, director and producer, true pioneer of cinema, the first person who made a narrative fiction film; author of hundreds of movies, but banished from history books. Ignored and forgotten. At last remembered.

London After Midnight (1927), directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, is the most sought-after lost film by fans of fantastic cinema. Has this mythical treasure finally been found in an old South American cinema?

The story of Fantômas, the first villain of modernity, from his birth in 1911 as a novel character to his contemporary vicissitudes, passing through Louis Feuillade, André Hunebelle, surrealism and Moscow.

A documentary film about the three remaining generations of fishermen in the Aral Sea-- Their everyday struggle to survive in one of the most dire and inhospitable places on the planet.

The first meeting of a U.S. president and a Mexican president took place when William Howard Taft met Porfirio Díaz on 16 October 1909, in El Paso. The meeting was celebrated in both El Paso and Juárez with parades, elaborate receptions, lavish gifts and large crowds. Shot by the pioneers of Mexican Cinema the brothers Alva. This is a typical example of newsreel material prior to the Mexican revolution. By hemerographical references we know that this footage was presented to the then president of Mexico General Porfirio Díaz in the Castle of Chapultepec, then residence of the president.

The tragic story of the greatest soccer player the most have never heard of.