German Film Museum

This guide to the German Film Museum in Frankfurt follows the restorers working behind this riverside villa, racing to save decaying nitrate film before it crumbles for good. It traces the museum back to 1971, when Frankfurt's culture chief Hilmar Hoffmann argued that film deserved the same civic backing as opera, and to the classicist villa itself, raised two centuries earlier by a local pharmacist. Along the way you'll get to thread a strip of film through a real projector upstairs, the way generations of cinema operators once did for a living.