Everyone remembers their first. First kiss. First car. First job. First movie that scared you so badly you spent the next several nights carefully not looking into the darkened hallway outside your bedroom.^[1] We attach a certain importance to firsts because they give us a convenient place to start a story.

Unfortunately, cinema has never been especially good about this – it can tell a fine story, but the stories it tells about itself are not always complete or entirely reliable.

Ask who invented motion pictures and the answer depends on what you mean by “motion,” “picture,” “invented,” and possibly “who.” Louis Le Prince shot moving images with a single-lens camera in Leeds, England, in 1888, several years before Edison’s Kinetoscope or the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe. Some of those films still survive. Then, in 1890, shortly before he intended to demonstrate his invention publicly in the United States, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon, France, bound for Paris and vanished without a trace.

This was inconsiderate of him from the standpoint of film historians.

The traditional birthday of cinema is December 28, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière presented a ticketed program of projected films in Paris. It is a very tidy origin story, which should immediately make us suspicious. Edison’s Kinetoscope parlors had been charging people to peer at moving pictures in a box since 1894, beating the Lumières by a year with paid, public motion picture presentations, but they weren’t theatrical presentations. The Skladanowsky brothers projected films for paying audiences in Berlin in November 1895, a month before the Lumières. More inconveniently, the Lambda Company’s Eidoloscope projected a 12-minute boxing film to a paying New York audience on May 20, 1895, seven months before the famous Lumière screening. The Lumières did not so much invent cinema as arrive with an exceptionally good, portable camera/projector system^[2] and a much better publicity department.

What the Lumières could not provide was length. Their Cinématographe held enough film for about 50 seconds of screen time. Early movie programs therefore consisted of collections of brief “actualities,” comic scenes, travel views, tricks, dances, highlights from boxing matches and plays, trains arriving at stations, workers leaving factories, and other subjects that suggested filmmakers were still trying to determine what people really wanted to see.

They worked it out surprisingly quickly.

The Lumières delivered the first scripted fiction film in 1895 (L'Arroseur Arrosé or The Waterer Watered). Georges Méliès demonstrated that movies could do considerably more than present short gags or document trains arriving at stations with Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), generally identified as the earliest science fiction film. Narrative films grew longer, exhibitors began showing them as the principal attraction rather than one item among many, and the “feature” film emerged.^[3]

This creates our next problem: What exactly is a feature film?

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a feature as a motion picture running more than 40 minutes. That is wonderfully precise and not particularly useful when applied to an era in which nobody had agreed on the term yet, projection speeds varied,^[4] surviving prints may be incomplete, and a movie could become shorter simply because bits of it caught fire.^[5]

Still, there is one remarkably strong candidate for the world’s first feature film: Australia’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). Directed by Charles Tait, the original production ran for more than an hour and told the story of outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang. UNESCO describes it unequivocally as “the first full-length narrative feature film produced anywhere in the world.” Only fragments survive today.

Once feature-length movies appeared, filmmakers wasted very little time testing just how much “feature” an audience might tolerate. Giovanni Pastrone’s Italian epic Cabiria (1914) ran more than three hours, staged volcanic eruptions, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the fall of Carthage, and the sacrifice of children to Moloch, while making unusually sophisticated use of moving-camera and tracking shots. In 20 years, movies progressed from a short novelty to a three-hour spectacle.

In its early days, exhibitors would show a film print until it wore out then move on to something else.^[6] If they wanted to draw in a new audience, they would remake the film and the process would start all over again. There was no attempt to preserve films for future generations.^[7] The Library of Congress estimates that 75 percent of American feature-length silent films are lost or incomplete. That is just the United States, which had a large commercial film industry and comparatively extensive documentation. In countries where early production was sporadic, archives were disrupted by war or political upheaval, film preservation began late, or nitrate prints simply did what nitrate prints are distressingly good at doing,^[8] the evidence can be considerably thinner. As a result, identifying a country’s “first feature film” sometimes resembles reconstructing the winner of a race after most of the runners, the finish-line camera, and portions of the stadium have disappeared.

India provides a particularly good example. Shree Pundalik was publicly exhibited in Bombay in May 1912, almost a year before Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913). But Pundalik is disputed because it was essentially a filmed theatrical performance, its cameraman was British, and the negative was sent to London for processing. Raja Harishchandra, made by Phalke’s own company, is generally recognized as the first Indian feature and is the film officially accorded that status by the Government of India.

The argument is not really about which film came first. We know the dates. The argument is over what makes a production sufficiently Indian to become the first Indian feature. This makes assembling a list of each country’s first feature film particularly challenging.^[9]

In another example, Amalia (1914) was long identified as Argentina’s first feature and remains its oldest surviving feature. More recent scholarship points instead to the 60-minute Nelly o la prima pobre, released the previous year. A film can therefore be the first one everyone remembers without actually being the first one. History, much like family genealogy, becomes considerably more complicated once someone starts checking the paperwork.

Then there is nationality itself. Countries divide, merge, acquire independence, lose empires, change names, move borders, and occasionally disappear altogether. Films are also international creatures. Money can come from one country, a director from another, a production company from a third, the cast from several more, and the whole thing can be shot somewhere else. A film photographed IN a country is not automatically a film FROM that country.

When we set out to identify the first feature film produced in each country, we knew we’d have to separate out the first foreign film exhibited there and the first movie merely photographed there. We didn’t expect to have to deal with the first production that later became famous enough for everyone to stop looking backward for earlier works. Or controversies over which film started production first but was released later^[10] or if a documentary can count as a feature film.^[11] We started with lists like Letterboxd’s First-ever Feature Film by Country and Wikipedia’s List of cinematic firsts, but then researched their claims and filled in the gaps where we could. Where the first production cannot be established with reasonable confidence, we fall back to the earliest feature from that country that can be verified.^[12] We use the modern 40-minute feature threshold as a guidepost, but not an absolute rule.^[13] If reliable historical sources identify a work as a feature despite an uncertain, variable, or slightly shorter surviving runtime, we consider the historical context rather than disqualifying it.

While motion pictures may not be permanent, EIDR IDs are. EIDR’s Emmy Award-winning Content ID registry includes works from the earliest days of cinema up to the latest releases, all in a publicly resolvable, freely referenceable, permanent database of descriptive metadata and third-party references. So, with the definitions stated, the caveats firmly attached, and the historians already preparing their objections, here are the first feature films from around the world.

^[1] For me, it was Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959) – specifically, the bit near the end where Darby rides the Death Coach, and not because Sean Connery has a singing role. I was even fine with Lee Marvin’s and Clint Eastwood’s singing in Paint Your Wagon (1969), but Pierce Brosnan’s singing in Mamma Mia! (2008) was a bridge too far. (Now, A Bridge Too Far (1977) is also a fine film, though with very little singing.)

^[2] In early cinema, the camera was the projector. When used as a camera, light entered through the lens and exposed the film negative. When used as a projector, a positive print of the original negative was run through the camera, this time with the back open to admit a light source so the image could be projected through the lens and onto a screen.

^[3] This helped break the so-called Edison Trust (a patent monopoly on the early motion picture industry in the United States). Edison famously disliked feature films and insisted that Trust members focus exclusively on shorts.

^[4] Hand-crank cameras and projectors ran at whatever speed the operator chose. Motorized camera and projector speeds were not standardized at 24 frames-per-second until the widespread adoption of synchronous sound.

^[5] Nitrate film (made of nitrocellulose) was used through the early 1950s. It is extremely flammable and highly unstable to the point that old nitrate film can spontaneously combust. It burns at a very high heat and provides its own oxygen, so it’s very difficult to put out once it ignites. Projection booths used to be equipped with a heavy steel door that would close to cut off the booth from the theater in case of a nitrate film fire. When I originally saw Trainspotting (1995), there’s a scene where a hallucinated baby crawls across the ceiling, then stops and melts as the whole world goes white – except it doesn’t. The film jammed in the projector and the heat of the projection lamp melted the film. If that had been nitrate film, the entire projection booth would have gone up in flames in an instant. A nitrocellulose derivative is still used today by magicians as flash paper – imagine several thousand feet of that stuff going off all at once in an enclosed space.

^[6] A typical release pattern for a motion picture was to premiere in prestige theaters in major cities. When that run ended, the print would move on to second run theaters. When that run ended, the print would move on to progressively smaller markets and revival theaters until the film was so damaged that it could not be shown any more. Grindhouse cinema of the 1970s made a virtue of this, showing dirty, scratched, and patched prints of cheap films until the prints simply wore out. When the movie Grindhouse (2007) attempted to recreate this experience, many audience members complained to theater management that the film was damaged, when this was actually the intentional aesthetic.

^[7] Disney was the first to break this pattern by re-releasing their animated features every seven years, reasoning that there would always be a new crop of children who would drag their parents to the theater to see Disney’s films.

^[8] Bursting into flames.

^[9] While we use the 40-minute cutoff as a simplification, it’s not an absolute rule. The term “feature film” came about to identify a particular movie that was featured (generally in advertising) alongside a program of shorter films, cartoons, newsreels, etc. At that time, the feature was the highlight of the program, irrespective of duration.

^[10] We resolved that controversy by selecting the first film to receive public exhibition that was produced by local filmmakers, since release date is much easier to verify than the production start date.

^[11] It can.

^[12] We did end up with one tie. Both The Caribbean Fox and The Right and the Wrong were local productions by Trinidad and Tobago filmmakers and were both released in 1970. We can’t be sure which came first, so we list them both.

^[13] Under the Academy’s current general rules, more than 40 minutes is a feature; 40 minutes or less is a short. Somewhere between 40:00 and 40:01, apparently, art undergoes a profound metaphysical transformation.

First Features by Country