Everything builds on what has gone before it. Of course there would still be films without Lumiere, Griffith, Murnau, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Rossellini, Godard, Altman, Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. But what would the films at this year’s Berlinale look like, had it not been for the work of these directors? The Lumière brothers’ gardener, Eisenstein’s use of montage, Jean Seberg’s cry ‘New York Herald Tribune!’ and Robert Altman’s long takes have changed the language of cinema. In his documentary film project THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY director Mark Cousins goes on a journey through the evolutionary history of cinema. In interviews with Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrman and Stanley Donen, the cinema’s pioneering innovations in technology and dramaturgy are described and analysed. The influence of Asian, Middle Eastern and African cinema on film language is not forgotten, either. The universality and beauty of this language becomes clear when Indian director Mani Kaul and actress Kyoko Kagawa, or Kurosawa or Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami begin to talk about their work and their cinematic dreams.