2025 Honorary Award

As has been the case for several years now, the Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote throws a special spotlight on a person, school, institution or organization whose life or history is connected to the production, dissemination or defence of cinema at its best, a cinema that contributes towards lasting artistic creation and our collective cultural heritage.
The award—a unique-edition wine produced by El Grifo, the oldest winery in the Canary Islands—is conceived as a toast to life and to a job well done. This small bottled distillation of the essence of Lanzarote is linked to individuals and entities not generally found among the usually recipients of festival awards: magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma, film schools like San Antonio de los Baños, restoration laboratories like L’Immagine Ritrovata, or film poster artists such as Margrit and Peter Sickert. The annual award acknowledges the choral character of an art form that is so simple (sound and light on a white screen) yet so difficult to bring into being: dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people and professions work together to make a single film possible.
In 2025, the institution chosen to receive the honorary award is the Eden-Théâtre of La Ciotat, the oldest working cinema in the world, contemporary with the Eiffel Tower and the setting of the first screenings by the Lumière brothers.
Although in its early years the venue hosted theatrical performances, concerts and even boxing and Greco-Roman wrestling matches, its first owner, Raoul Gallaud, made friends with Antoine Lumière, the father of Louis and Auguste, and in 1895 he took part in one of the “cinematographic experiences” hosted in the family home. Bowled over by those moving images, he invited his host to present them to the public at the Eden.
The first public screening took place on 21 March 1899 with around twenty Lumière films, including Boat Launch at La Ciotat, A Trip Through the Alps by Train, The Cowboys of America and Women Fighting. The poster from that pioneering screening is currently on display in the cinema’s lobby.

Since then, through varying ups and downs, the Eden-Théâtre in La Ciotat has remained open as a film theatre. Today it programmes twenty-five screenings a week and welcomes several thousand visitors each month, all wishing to experience the distinctive atmosphere of the old Italian-style theatre, with its two grand galleries and its unmistakable air of other times.

The award will be accepted by Michel Cornille, president of Les Lumières de l’Eden, an association dedicated to maintaining and preserving the venue, and director of the world’s oldest functioning cinema theatre.

The Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote is proud to include the Eden-Théâtre of La Ciotat in its list of Honorary Award recipients, as a tribute to all the cinemas around the world which, against all odds, continue to nurture the magic of the seventh art. Heroic spaces that resist the onslaught of devices and platforms in order to offer us the genuine pleasure of watching films as they were meant to be seen: in the shared darkness of a theatre, in front of a big screen, as a prelude to meeting and conversing with others.