"It was just this trunk of films that seemed too good to throw away. He offered them to museums and even tried to sell them through an antique store, whose owner soon told him to take them away after learning vintage nitrate film reels were highly combustible and could explode. - Pioneering short film -Spliced in the middle of one of the 10 reels was a lost short film by Georges Melies, a French cinema pioneer -- the first to experiment with fictional narratives and special effects at the very dawn of moving pictures. - Miraculous survival -In retrospect, piracy was a salvation for film historians as it means that Melies' work lives on. Library film preservation specialists spent a week restoring the film reel frame-by-frame and digitizing it.

Source: Bangkok Post April 13, 2026 03:26 UTC