Jacques Richard pays tribute to one of the most important and overlooked figures in film history in this engrossing and lovingly sprawling portrait of French film historian Henri Langlois (1914-1977). Langlois began collecting silent films before it had ever occurred to anyone else that the medium might be worth saving. In 1936, he founded the Cinémathèque Française, which progressed from just 10 films in 1936 to 60,000 films in the early 1970s. The unsung hero of the French New Wave, Langlois nurtured talented young filmmakers, gave them a visual vocabulary in which to work and shared a film tradition against which they could rebel. Indeed, the Cinémathèque was a place where anything could happen, and it did. Langlois was at the height of his popularity in February 1968 when the De Gaulle government suddenly evicted him from the Cinémathèque. Outraged by this, students, filmmakers and cineasts staged mass protests in April 1968, foreshadowing what was to come in May. Due to their efforts, Langlois was reinstated. This film features interviews and footage of Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others.  RH