| Semi-Documentary |
The film starts a hundred years ago and it ends today, with Max Skladanowsky's daughter Lucie who still remembers her dad and those early days of cinema very well. The film was shot mostly on an old hand-cranker from the twenties, silent, and in the best slapstick tradition.
This film by Wim Wenders and students of the Munich Film Academy deals with the birth of cinema in Berlin, where the brothers Skladanowsky built a projector, the "Bioskop", at the same time as the Lumière Brothers in France and Edison in America, and thereby co-invented "moving pictures" in their very own, poetic, poor, endearing and rather "un-German" way.
Source: A Trick Of The Light
Director of photography: Jürgen Jürges
Editor: Peter Przygodda
Music by: Laurent Petitgand
Producers: Wim Wenders, Veit Helmer, Wolfgang Längsfeld
Production Company: Wim Wenders Produktion, Berlin, in co-production with Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, München and Veit Helmer Filmproduktion, Berlin
Principal Cast: Udo Kier, Nadine Büttner, Christoph Merg, Otto Kuhnle, Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky
Length: 79 min., 2.201 m
Format: 35 mm, b/w and colour
Original Version: German
Subtitled Version: French
Sound Technology: Mono
International Festival Screenings: MontrÈal 96: Festival du Nouveau CinÈma, Venedig 96: Window on Images
Funding by: Filmförderungsanstalt, BMI
World Sales: Road Sales GmbH Mediadistribution
Ulrich Felsberg
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D-10629 Berlin
phone: ++(30) 32 79 60 01
fax: ++(30) 32 79 60 11