How was a nearly complete version of Metropolis rediscovered and restored?

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Fritz Lang directing Woman in the Moon (1929) — Fritz Lang Although it took Fritz Lang some 21 years to make 22 Hollywood films, arguably at least half of them are noirish masterpieces of menace. His time in Hollywood, which began in 1934, followed a directing career in Germany during the 1920s that included several landmark films.

For decades, Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis existed only in heavily edited and shortened versions, as the original 153-minute cut was long considered lost.

The breakthrough occurred in 2008 when a deteriorated but nearly complete 147-minute print was discovered in the archives of the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Following this discovery, the film underwent several months of intensive restoration in Germany. The resulting reconstructed version of the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010, finally restoring much of Lang's original vision to the public.1