In recent hours, social media pages circulated a video clip that its publishers claimed belonged to the late Queen Elizabeth II, while she was throwing food to a group of poor children, accompanied by a woman accompanying her.
In the video, two women are shown throwing pieces at people who pick them up on the ground, and the accompanying comment read, “Queen Elizabeth… the height of sophistication when she feeds humans as if they were sheep.”
The clip spread as part of a campaign led by some pages to criticize the colonial past of the United Kingdom, but the reality of the video completely changed that.
The video is actually an excerpt from a short film by the Lumiere brothers filmed in Vietnam and shown in 1901, years before the queen was born.
And the spread of this scene began the day following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in the Scottish Balmoral Palace, at the age of 96, Thursday.
Agence France-Presse said, “After cutting the film into still scenes, the research indicated that it was one of the films of the two famous brothers Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumiere, who presented the world’s first motion pictures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jHJw0QkBFg
According to the same source, this film, directed by Gabriel Fire, was filmed between 1899 and 1900 in a region of “French Indochina” that is today Vietnam, and was shown in France in 1901, more than twenty years before the birth of Elizabeth II.
This film shows real scenes of two French women throwing coins to indigenous children, while misleading publications used a restored version of the film.