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Wim Wenders will be a special guest of Italy’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival dedicated to cinematic treasures of the past where a freshly restored copy of his “A Trick of the Light” (“Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky”), which pays tribute to forgotten pioneers of the moving image, will have its world premiere.

Shot by Wenders with a group of students from the Munich Film Academy in 1995 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, the film is about the origins of cinema and its German inventors: the Skladanowsky brothers who On Nov. 1, 1895, presented a show of eight film loops at Berlin’s Wintergarten, six weeks before the more famous Lumiere freres’ exhibition in Paris.

“A Trick of the Light” uses stylistic devices from silent cinema, including a hand-cranked camera from the 1920s that produces 16 frames per second. The film’s score by French composer Laurent Petitgand also pays homage to the silent film era.

When thinking of the best French movies of the 21st century, there are some titles that leap to mind immediately, even if the past 23 years haven’t appeared to be as creatively fecund as the heady heights of the New Wave period. Celine Sciamma, François Ozon, Bruno Dumont, and Julia Ducournau have all produced stunning, instantly canonical works. But what’s interesting is to consider how expansive the idea of “Frenchness” in cinema has been this century: on the list below, Austrian Michael Haneke, Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, and American Julian Schnabel appear, with the main criterion for inclusion being simply the use of the French language.

Their inclusion does call into question a bit the idea of national cinemas. And yet, even in this highly interconnected, global 21st century, France singularly remains one of the medium’s most essential guiding lights. From the pioneer era of the Lumiere brothers to...