#82 on AFI's 10th Anniversary List of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time
A 1927 American silent film directed by German film director F. W. Murnau. The story was adapted by Carl Mayer from the short story "Die Reise nach Tilsit" ("A Trip to Tilsit") by Hermann Sudermann. Sunrise won an Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929 and sixty years later was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress for films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Murnau chose the new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, so it is one of the first with a soundtrack of music and sound effects. It incorporated Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, which was later used as the theme for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-65).
Although the original negative was destroyed in a nitrate fire in 1937, a new negative was created from a surviving print.
This cache is part of the AFI Top 100 Films Challenge (100 caches to be placed in Southern MN)