Algaida 2008

Salamanca City Novel Prize 2007

The culture of the Belle Époque idolized the hunters of images. Painters, portraitists, and filmmakers had become the notaries of the bourgeois joy of living. The Lumière family saga embodied the very model of this social archetype. First, they discovered the snapshot—capturing life in impressions. Then, they launched cinema into the world—illuminating life in motion.

Amid this inventive frenzy, their employee Jean Flandrin visits the father of Impressionism, Claude Monet, in search of chromatic answers.

The emotional tribulations of the Lumière family chemist, the police intrigues in fin-de-siècle Paris, and the dialogue between painting and cinema come together in a story that culminates in the conquest of color photography.

A fleeting mirage. For by then, the optimism of those joyous years would be buried in the trenches of the Great War.

From that moment on, however, memory would be read in images.