Kinowelt International will be unveiling a 'long-lost' film by Ernst Lubitsch and the 'Director's Cut' of Percy Adlon's 1987 international hit Bagdad Cafe as market premieres at the forthcoming Marche du Film in Cannes.
Made in 1921, Lubitsch's The Loves Of Pharaoh (Das Weib Des Pharao) was his last large-scale production in Germany before the director left Europe to seek his fortune in Hollywood.
Shot on lavish sets in the south of Berlin with thousands of extras, the film featured some of the most popular actors of the silent movie era including Paul Wegener, Dagny Servaes and Emil Jannings, who won the first ever Academy Award for best lead actor in 1928.
After the original projection prints were lost or destroyed, the film had not been seen for almost 60 years until a fragment of a Russian release print and another fragment from Italy were rediscovered and then combined in a digital restoration undertaken by the company who had also worked on Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 2001.
The work on The Loves Of Pharaoh is the first feature-length film restoration in digital tinting technology. Image by image, the fragile nitrate-based fragments were scanned with a high-resolution 2K film scanner and then digitally restored and retouched scene by scene.
In addition, the film's original score by the famous opera composer Eduard Kuenneke has been taken to produce a new orchestral recording adapted and synchronised to the restored film images, which will be heard for the firsr tie since the first release.
Meanwhile, Adlon's dramatic comedy Bagdad Cafe, starring Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance, has been fully remastered in high definition.
At a running time of 107 minutes, it is now around 20 minutes longer than the international version that had been available for the past 20 years, according to Kinowelt International's head of world sales Stelios Ziannis.
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