To Each His Own Cinema

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Theo Angelopoulos directs. Paweł Edelman behind the camera. Mychael Danna scores. Lívia Serpa cuts. Produced in France, Japan. Dialogue in Danish, English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

• 1Released 19 years ago.
• 2Dialogue crosses 12 languages: Danish, English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin.
• 3International production across 2 countries: France, Japan.
• 4208+ people credited in cast and crew — a small city's worth of labour.
• 5Directed by Theo Angelopoulos, shot by Paweł Edelman. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
• 6Original score by Mychael Danna. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
• 7Editor Lívia Serpa shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
• 8Golshifteh Farahani and Taraneh Alidoosti and Pegah Ahangarani carry the top of the cast.
• 9Marketing tagline: "A declaration of love on the big screen.".
• 10IMDB entry: tt0973844 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

The technical file

Cinematography

Paweł Edelman

Original score

Mychael Danna

Editing

Lívia Serpa

Production design

Norihiro Isoda

Costume design

Fabio Perrone

Makeup / hair

Nelly Robin

VFX supervisor

Chel White

Runtime

100 min · 1h 40m

Status

Released

Original language

FR

IMDB

To Each His Own Cinema (2007) ↗

Also by

Theo Angelopoulos

• 
  Athens, Return to the Acropolis

  1983 · ★ 8.1
• 
  Eternity and a Day

  1998 · ★ 7.8
• 
  The Weeping Meadow

  2004 · ★ 7.6
• 
  Landscape in the Mist

  1988 · ★ 7.6
• 
  The Hunters

  1977 · ★ 7.6
• 
  Ulysses' Gaze

  1995 · ★ 7.5

Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

• 

  ▶
  To Each His Cinema (2007) Trailer

  Trailer

Community reviews

What people are saying

• CRCulver2018-08-14
  ★ 5/10

  TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA is a 2007 collection of 3-minute shorts by some 36 directors around the world on the theme of what cinema means to them. So many auteurs already make films about films inasmuch as they allude to classics, but here most of the shorts are actually set in cinemas, with audiences in rows of seating. You'll need to have a decent familiarity with the arthouse canon before watching this, though. It's fascinating how so many of the directors, regardless of what continent they hailed from, choose to have French New Wave films playing in the background as their stories are told. It opens with Raymond Depardon's "Open-Air Cinema", where a crowd of Egyptians watched an outdoor projection in Alexandria, and in spite of the unusual writing and the women's veils, they seem to be just like us. Zhang Yimou later does much the same in a Chinese village. One of the remarkable aspects of this collection are the similar ideas. Two stories deal with thieves stealing purses in dark cinemas. Three deal with the blind and how they perceive cinema. Many look back to childhood/earlier eras. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's short recreates 1950s Taiwan on an elaborate set to show the typical visit to a cinema of his youth. Amos Gitai's film juxtaposes 1930s viewers of Yiddish cinema, a vibrant tradition destroyed by the Holocaust, with a modern Israeli audience in wartime. Youssef Chahine's looks back at his first visit to Cannes 47 years before. Some of the films deal with serious political themes: Amos Gitai on the Israeli-Arab relations, David Croneberg on anti-semitism, and Bille August with Danish–immigrant relations. However, there are also a number of overtly funny shorts, like Takeshi Kitano's, where a working man's chance to unwind by watching a film keeps getting interrupted by problems with the projector. In Lars Van Trier's contribution, Jacques Franz plays an annoying businessman who can't stop bragging about his success, though the extreme gore and violence that follows makes for very black humour. Elia Suleiman's is Buster Keatonish physical comedy in the modern world. Some shorts are notable for continuing an aesthetic that the director had already established in an earlier film. Kaurismäki's short is his usual style of an ostensibly contemporary setting, but with 1950s rock music and working class people who speak utterly deadpan. (Unusually, however, it uses none of his typical troupe of actors.) Abbas Kiarostami's "Where is My Romeo?" is a sort of follow-up to his experimental film SHIRIN, which showed only the faces of numerous women as they watched a classic Iranian tale of love; here these women are watching "Romeo and Juliet" instead. All in all, this proved a continuously engaging film, whose 2-hour running time just flew by for me. Nearly all the shorts were entertaining, the sole exceptions for me being Jane Campion's oddball short, where an adult woman plays an insect that vexes a projectionist, and Gus Van Sant's film with a randy teenager entering into the film being projected. Nothing here seems a must-see classic, but if you like a few of the directors here, you're sure to enjoy this set.

  Read full review ↓

Production companies

Who made it

• 

  Elzévir Films

  FR

• 

  StudioCanal

  FR

• 

  ARTE

  FR

• 

  Office Kitano

  JP

Key crew

• ProducerJacky Pang
• Visual Effects SupervisorChel White
• EditorLívia Serpa
• CinematographyMauro Pinheiro Jr.
• ProducerTakeshi Kitano
• ProducerAki Kaurismäki
• EditorYannis Tsitsopoulos
• ProducerAlain Sarde
• EditorBodil Kjærhauge
• EditorOlga Grinshpun
• ProducerTakio Yoshida
• ProducerGilles Jacob
• ProducerWong Kar-Wai
• EditorValérie Loiseleux
• ProducerMasayuki Mori
• EditorStephen Mirrione
• EditorMarie-Hélène Dozo
• Production DesignNorihiro Isoda
• EditorTakeshi Kitano
• ProducerRobert Benmussa
• ProducerRachel Curl
• Co-ProducerDavid Allen Cress
• Executive ProducerJacques Arhex
• Line ProducerDominique Combe

Themes & keywords

What it's about, really

• anthology
• woman director

Release history · US

When it landed

• Premiere2026-04-16· Beijing International Film Festival

Also known as

International titles

• Cada um com seu CinemaBR
• Cada quién su cineMX
• 그들 각자의 영화관KR
• У каждого свое киноRU
• U kazhdogo svoe kinoRU
• 給康城的情書HK
• Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au cœur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commenceFR