The Associated Press informed that lost scenes from the 1927 classic silent film “Metropolis” were shown on Thursday for the first time in decades.

Film historians had lost any hope of ever retrieving the missing portions of Fritz Lang’s movie, until three reels were found in Argentina.

Two film lovers made the discovery in the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires earlier this year. However, the small museum’s director, Paula Felix-Didier, reported that it was only a copy of the German science fiction movie.

“Metropolis” was written by Fritz Lang and his actress wife, Thea von Harbou, and portrays a 21^st-century society divided between a class of underworld employees and their superiors, the “thinkers”, who have power over their lives.

Shortly after its initial release, distributors reduced Fritz Lang's three-and-a-half-hour work of art into a much shorter version viewed by millions worldwide.

Nevertheless, a private collector took an original adaptation to Argentina in 1928, where it has stayed ever since, according to the Buenos Aires Museum of Cinema’s director.

For almost 30 years, Argentine film fanatic Fernando Pena begged the museum’s officials to verify their archives in order to find the original version of “Metropolis”.

In April this year, museum researchers finally decided to reveal the reels in the archive.

Paula Felix-Didier brought the film last month to the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden, Germany, which owns the rights to the movie. Specialists confirmed the fact that the movie was the “real thing”.