The First Public Film Screening
Next: December 28, 2026
Ten short films for one franc.
The story
Where it comes from
On 28 December 1895, in the Salon Indien, a former billiard room below the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris, Antoine Lumière presented his sons' Cinématographe to a paying public for the first time. For one franc, spectators watched ten films shot by Louis Lumière, each under a minute long, beginning with workers leaving the family factory in Lyon. This Story marks that screening, the start of cinema as a show watched together. Word spread fast, and within weeks the little room was drawing thousands of people a day.
How it's celebrated
There is no official observance, but the films survive: the ten from that first programme were restored by the French film archives for cinema's centenary, and all ten together last under ten minutes. Watch them, then gather some friends, turn the lights down and see something together, which is exactly what those first spectators came for.
Did you know
- The famous L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat was not among the ten films shown that first night.
- Georges Méliès, later the director of A Trip to the Moon, was so taken with the Cinématographe that he offered to buy one; Antoine Lumière refused to sell.
- On 7 July 1896 a Lumière agent, Marius Sestier, held India's first film screening at Watson's Hotel in Bombay.
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- Rudyard Kipling's Birthday · December 30, 2026
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- New Year's Day · January 1, 2027