This new documentary celebrates the pioneering achievements of French entrepreneurs August and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Lumière, le cinéma! illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for the very first motion pictures, introducing the art of the moving image to a somewhat skeptical public. Filmmaker and cinephile Thierry Frémaux (director of the Cannes Film Festival and cofounder of the Institut Lumière) narrates excerpts from new restorations of more than 100 short films, set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré.