CENTURY OLD MOON CLASSIC LANDS IN CANNES

A hand-tinted color print of the 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès, thought to have been lost for decades, is scheduled to be screened tonight (Wednesday) at the Cannes Film Festival. The nearly decomposed nitrate print was discovered in Barcelona, Spain nearly 20 years ago and turned over to restoration experts at Technicolor, who copied thousands of frames of the film that could be recovered and used frames from an existing black and white print to fill in the gaps, hand-tinting them to match. Daily Variety reported today that the restoration of the 14-minute film cost about $500,000. “This was more of a resurrection than a restoration,” Tim Burton, head of restoration services at Technicolor, told Daily Variety.