The Cinema Guild Acquires Dominique Benicheti's Lost Masterpiece Cousin Jules

The Cinema Guild announced today that it has acquired all U.S. distribution rights to Dominique Benicheti's Cousin Jules, a lost masterpiece of cinema, now exquisitely restored. Premiering to raves at the 1973 Locarno Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize, the new restoration of Cousin Jules debuted at the 2012 New York Film Festival.

The first repertory release from the Cinema Guild, Cousin Jules will receive a theatrical release later this year.

The Film

One of the great, unheralded achievements in documentary, Cousin Jules was the result of five years of painstaking work by director Dominique Benicheti and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn. Over that period, they photographed in Cinemascope and recorded in stereophonic sound the daily lives of Jules and his wife—French farmers living alone in the countryside. The result is a ravishing, totally immersive work, in which we not only enter into the subjects' world but also into the very rhythms of their lives.

Yet despite the extraordinary reviews that accompanied its festival screenings, the film was never released beyond these limited showings. In part, this is due to Benicheti's insistence that the film only be exhibited in its native Cinemascope format – something which many arthouse theaters at the time were not equipped to do.

Over the years the negative and existing copies of the film began to disintegrate. Benicheti himself was in the early stages of restoring the film at the laboratory where he worked in France when he died very suddenly in 2011. A group of the film's most dedicated supporters continued his efforts and in 2012 a beautiful new 2K restoration of Cousin Jules was presented at the 50th New York Film Festival.

The Director

Dominique Benicheti was born in 1943 in Paris. He directed and produced more than 30 films – documentaries, scientific films, institutional films and animation - and was a technical and creative consultant for many 3D and large format films. In the late 1970s, he taught documentary filmmaking at Harvard University before working at the Jefferson Laboratories of Experimental Physics and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Benicheti was also active in the launch of Arane-Gulliver, one of the premier 70mm and special format film laboratories in Europe. When he died suddenly in 2011, he left behind several screenplays for 3D and large format films.