Source: Apple | Rope of Silicon | First Showing

On May 7th, cinephiles everywhere can rejoice, as Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis is being released in select theaters in the U.S. Reintroduced as The Complete Metropolis, this version will be completely restored with 25 additional minutes of lost footage inserted back into the film along with the original Gottfried Huppertz score!

You can check out the trailer below, or watch it in HD over at Apple (definitely recommend watching the HD version to get the full effect of the restoration).

From Rope of Silicon:

This new footage was found back in July of 2008 when Paula Felix-Didier, director of the museum Museo del Cine, discovered a copy of the film that included nearly all of the scenes once thought lost forever totaling some 700 meters, making for 25 minutes of new footage. All of it has been restored, some in ways unimaginable as you can see from the image above. Additional images from the found footage can be seen here as well as watch some of the new footage from the discovered scenes here.

Not many theaters are scheduled to show the newly restored film, although perhaps more may be added in the next couple of weeks. For a complete listing, click here. A DVD and Blu-ray release of “The Complete Metropolis” will hit stores this November.

HD version over at Apple.

Plot Summary from Rope of Silicon:

The film is set in the future, in a time when humans are divided into two groups: the thinkers, who make plans (but don’t know how anything works), and the workers, who achieve goals (but don’t have the vision). Completely separate, neither group is complete, but together they make a whole. One man from the “thinkers” dares visit the underground where the workers toil, and is astonished by what he sees.