24 • 11 HK City Hall | 26 • 11, 04 • 12 HK Space Museum

The color version of Georges Méliès’ masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon (1902), was presented at the Cannes Film Festival during the Opening evening, on May 11, 2011. 109 years after its first release, a fully restored color version is once again visible on screen, after being considered lost.

In 2010, a restoration project was launched by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. Thanks to the advanced digital technologies available today, the fragments of the 13,375 frames were reassembled and restored one by one. The film will be shown at the opening of the 40th edition of the French Cinepanorama with an original soundtrack by the French band, AIR.

In May 1902, Georges Méliès shot the film, A Trip to the Moon. It was released in black and white, and also in color, hand painted. It was considered as a long feature at the time – around 14 minutes – and was success worldwide. The first blockbuster in the history of cinema was immediately pirated and plagiarized.

In 1923, the black and white version survived Georges Méliès’ act of folly, when he attempted to burn his collection of film negatives.

The color version was considered definitively lost, however a color print was finally found in 1993 in Barcelona, Spain, donated by a private film collector to the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

A colossal amount of work was done in order to breathe life back into this color masterpiece by Georges Méliès, for the 150th anniversary of the filmmaker’s birth.


1902 • Color • 16 min • 2011 restored version
France • No Dialogue • Music by AIR
Director: Georges Méliès



This film was restored by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage.

	About Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema Founded in 1987, the Groupama Gan Foundation for the Cinema is today one of the key private partners for French films. It has accompanied 140 filmmakers in making their first feature film, thanks to project grants. Today its support is re cognised as a mark of quality. The Foundation also promotes more than 30 film festivals in France and around the world. Jointly with the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, it restored Selvi Boylum al Yazmalim by Atif Yilmaz within a yearly restoration of Turkish classics, Pierre Etaix’s films in 2010 and, of course A Trip to the Moon, in color, by Georges Méliès in 2011. www.fondation-groupama-gan.com
	About Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage Created in 2006, The Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage is a non-profit entity, acting in the field of preservation and promotion of film heritage.The Technicolor Foundation operates worldwide according three main directions: preserve but also highlight cinema heritage and finally train and sensitize everyone who can play a part in the safeguard of film heritage. Each year, one of the objectives of this foundation is also to restore a key title of the international cinema heritage in order to better raise the audience’s awareness about the importance of film heritage and about the risks endangered by films when not properly safeguarded. www.technicolorfilmfoundation.org