The Cheese Mites is a British short

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

 silent

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, produced by Charles Urban

Charles Urban

Charles Urban was an Anglo-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War...

 and directed by F. Martin Duncan,

Plot

A gentleman is put off his lunch by a microscopic view of the cheese mites in his Stilton cheese sandwich.

Production background

The film, "was the sensation of the first public programme of scientific films in Britain shown at the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, London, in August 1903," with according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "its claim to being scientific lay in its being shot through a microscope, revealing to a lay audience sights that would normally only have been available to owners of microscopes."

Preservation status

The British Film Institute

British Film Institute

The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...

reports that 49 seconds of the film is extant.