We invite you to attend the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive’s next edition of the Budapest Classics Film Marathon. The festival takes place between 12-17 September 2023, and it is open to visitors at all its favorite venues, Uránia National Film Theatre, Toldi Cinema, the French Institute, Budapest Music Center and the hugely popular and spectacular open-air screenings on Szent István Square in front of the Basilica.
This year, the Marathon’s focuses are Alexander Korda and his Universe, Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell, André de Toth, Adolph Zukor, Karel Zeman, female creators in Cinema, sport in film and we offer a yearly overview of recent restorations and rare pearls in the Open Archives section.
Our special guests this year among others: Andrew and Kevin Macdonald, Pierre Földes, Lajos Koltai…
The festival’s popular educational program continues: screenings, masterclasses, meet & greets, and a playhouse, all for younger film enthusiasts.
The festival’s professional program the BUDAPEST CLASSIC LAB will take place at the French Institute between 13-15 September at 10 am- 3 pm. During the 3 days conference we will dedicate lectures and round-table conversations on the topics of film restauration, preservation and sharing.
You can read more about the professional program on the following link: Budapest Classics Lab
Location: French Institute of Budapest, 17 Fő utca, Budapest. Access is free of charge.
We are pleased to invite you also to join us at the first Budapest Archive Market which will be held on 15th September 2023 at the French Institute. The Market is an excellent opportunity for directors and producers who are working with archive materials and are seeking more partners in the field. The Archive Market welcomes international and domestic archives to exhibit their remarkable collections.
Our aims are to create a vibrant platform that brings together the archives, filmmakers, and film professionals to foster business cooperation and exchange. Don't miss this unique opportunity to celebrate and explore film heritage!
By participating, you will have the opportunity to connect with the Hungarian and international industry professionals and Archives, who can be your future partners in developing your projects.
Regarding the market for any additional information, please contact Asia Dér: Asia.andrejevna@gmail.com
We look forward to welcoming you in Budapest on these events.
The film Slike iz života udarnika (Life of a Shock Force Worker, 1972, Yugoslavia, Bahrudin ‘Bato’ Čengić) that was awarded the joint film restoration grant in the framework of the programme ‘A Season of Classic Films’, has been selected to premiere in the 80th Venice International Film Festival. The international restoration premiere will take place on Wednesday 6 September at 11:15 (sala Corinto) and there are two repeat screenings on the 7th September.
On the occasion of the premiere, the Director of Photography Mr. Karpo Godina will be present as well as the Slovenian Minister of Culture Dr. Asta Vrečko and representatives from the collaborating European film heritage institutions (Slovenian cinematheque, Croatian State Archives – Croatian Cinematheque, Austrian Film Museum, Film Center Sarajevo, ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes).
About the film
The film is a collection of exquisitely beautiful tableaux vivants inspired by the lives of coal miners in post-WWII Yugoslavia. The main character is a miner who, despite being glorified for his hardworking achievements, lives a life that is anything but glitz and glamour.
Besides shining a light onto one of the blind spots on the map of European film heritage, the film touches upon the subject of propaganda — a pertinent matter in our post-truth era.
“Slike iz života udarnika was made based on a feeling, my feeling, the feeling of a man from Bosnia who saw the Stakhanovite tribe as the most moral form of acknowledging the working class, all that communism and a socialist society meant at the time,” commented filmmaker Bato Čengić during the TV programme Povečava, RTV Slovenia on 28 March 1996.
The film originally premiered at the Pula Film Festival in 1972 – out of competition – and was considered a representative of the film movement called New Yugoslav Cinema and widely known by its pejorative label Yugoslav Black Wave. Films of this movement depicted everyday life in Yugoslavia in a naturalistic way, showing it to be far less perfect than purported.
During the war in early 1990s, Bato Čengić deposited a 35mm print of the film at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana. The image and sound negatives are preserved at the Croatian state archive – Croatian cinematheque. The Slovenian Cinematheque and the Croatian state archive have been taking care of these precious film materials, but so far without the possibility of restoring them.
About the restoration
For the 3rd edition of the programme A Season of Classic Films, ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes presented the Joint Restoration Grant of € 50.000. A Season of Classic Films is an initiative developed by ACE to promote film preservation and is financially supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme. The objective of this specific grant is to underline the importance of preservation and restoration of film heritage through transnational collaboration of film institutions.
The Slovenian Cinematheque proposed the restoration of this film in collaboration with the Croatian state archive – Croatian cinematheque, the Austrian Film Museum and the Film Center Sarajevo.
At the Cannes Film Festival 2022, ACE awarded its Joint Restoration Grant to Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972). The jury, comprised of filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, Pordenone Silent Film Festival director Jay Weissberg and director of the Cinema-Fiction Department of ARTE Claudia Tronnier, selected the film from a raft of proposals submitted by European film archives. “Large parts of the Yugoslavian film heritage have so far been underserved,” the jury wrote about its choice. “Life of a Shock Force Worker has strong imagery, but it is in desperate need of colour grading since the original has faded with time. A key asset is that ACE and the four partner institutions responsible for this restoration project will collaborate with DoP Karpo Godina.”
Thanks to the Joint Restoration Grant of the Season of Classic Films and additional funding by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia, the restoration has been successfully carried out in 4K through a remarkable international collaboration.
The negative was cleaned and scanned at L’immagine Ritrovata in Bologna (Italy), the positive print was digitized at Film Center Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the film’s restoration and colour correction were completed at Teleking in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the sound restoration was carried out at 001 d.o.o. in Ljubljana (Slovenia).
The restored copy includes previously censored fragments.
The restored film is already planned for screenings in other international festivals as well as for a 90-day free online offer across the whole Europe via the ArteKino Classics programme in the coming autumn.
Please see here the latest news of A Season of Classic Films, a series of free screenings of restored films and parallel activities across Europe designed to attract younger audiences to our shared cinematic cultural heritage.
The International Classic Film Market, a market dedicated to film classics, is organized every year as part of the festival Lumière in Lyon, France, with meetings, roundtables, cocktails and screenings. For its 11th edition, the Market will be held on 17-20 October 2023, welcoming again a large number of right-owners and major catalogues. This year, the International Classic Film Market will also feature the new Re>Birth Programme, with special events dedicated to sales agents and buyers on Thursday, October 19 and Friday, October 20.
Designed in a collaborative spirit, the new “Re>Birth programme” brings together:
Right-owners or representatives of classic films looking for new commercial outlets.
Professionals looking for new opportunities: buyers, sellers, distributors, programmers, laboratories, publishers and all other partners who can contribute to the new exploitation of films.
The program will include a selection of feature-length films, recently restored or in the process of being restored, with a target of theatrical re-release, distribution media (TV, platforms, video publishing, etc.), international sales, financial partnerships, etc., on the scale of different territories.
For this first edition of the “Re>Birth Programme”, the following will be eligible:
Restored films certified Lumière Classics by the festival Lumière 2023.
Films with a restoration project submitted by Market accredited members.
These events present a new approach to expand the offer and promote classics on all media.
Re>Birth Programme #1 “films with label”: Thursday afternoon, October 19
Re>Birth Program #2 “films to be restored”: Friday morning, October 20
Each session will consist of 6 presentations of films pitched by their right-owners or representatives (15 minutes per pitch with video excerpts) in the Karbone room. One-to-one meetings will then be organized between the project owners and interested professionals in the Market Village.
More information and the forms to apply are on the MIFC website.
If you are interested in this project at the festival Lumière and its Market in Lyon, please reach out to mifc@institut-lumiere.org.
Until the 15th of July, a small survey of the existing technical resources (and the needs) for photochemical operations is open for ACE members. The aim is to make this information public and available. This will allow all ACE members to communicate to our community what resources we have in this area of preservation and exhibition of analogue film heritage.
In particular, the plan is to make this information available on the ACE website, so that everyone can easily find partners with common challenges, needs, and problems. Thanks to the synergy of ACE members and this knowledge sharing, this survey should help the film preservation community in finding common solutions.
This year’s ACE Workshop will focus on the state of digital preservation and the strategies for sharing digital content, VOD platforms, archival festivals, and cross-border access to European film heritage.
The EU-funded DE-BIAS project (January 2023 – December 2024) tackles outdated and harmful language in cultural heritage collections. Led by the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, in collaboration with thematic and domain aggregators and technical partners in the Europeana network, DE-BIAS aims to foster inclusivity and respect in digital collections.
DE-BIAS will develop an AI-powered tool to automatically detect problematic terms in metadata. It will provide information on their problematic nature and suggest appropriate alternatives using contextual vocabularies.
These vocabularies will focus on migration and colonial history, gender and sexual identity, and ethnicity and ethnoreligious identity. Collaboratively developed with marginalized communities, these vocabularies empower communities to reshape historical descriptions affected by outdated colonial, patriarchal, and hegemonic structures.
By fostering collaboration, DE-BIAS aims to enhance representation, participation, and inclusivity in museums and archives. It will provide capacity-building workshops and a knowledge base for cultural heritage professionals to address bias in their collections. The project will analyze over 4.5 million records in English, Italian, German, French, and Dutch, including metadata coming from film archives through the European Film Gateway to Europeana.
Derogatory language in item descriptions on Europeana will be automatically identified and flagged. The DFF is looking forward to delivering relevant project findings and results to the ACE membership in due course.
Full programme and award of the Joint Film Restoration Grant announced at Cannes
ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) unveiled May 19 at the Dutch Pavilion in Cannes details of the fourth A Season of Classic Films, a series of free screenings designed to attract younger audiences to our shared cinematic cultural heritage. The 2023 programme will run June to December 2023 across European cinemas and online.
The initiative also seeks to raise awareness of the work of European film archives, connecting the public with cinema history and the significance of film preservation.
European film heritage
The fourth edition of A Season of Classic Films will comprise a diverse programme curated by more than 20 European film heritage institutions. The world premiere restorations will be presented as free screenings across Europe until the end of 2023 and will be supplemented by educational tools to attract younger audiences to European film heritage, such as live music, introductions by filmmakers etc.
The films span early silent classics, thrillers and romantic comedies, to works focusing on current topics such as feminism or the impact of urban planning to environment. Many of the films will be globally accessible online for free for a limited time to further promote European film heritage to international audiences. All films are available with English subtitles.
A Season of Classic Films is supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.
Joint Restoration Grant
During the Cannes event, ACE also presented a Joint Restoration Grant of €40,000 for the restoration of the Hungarian ghost story After Death (1920) by Alfréd Deésy. The esteemed jury, made up of filmmakers Radu Jude and Saodat Ismailova, ARTE France general director Olivier Père and film curator-educator Cecilia Barrionuevo, chose After Deathfrom an array of proposals submitted by Europe’s film heritage institutions.
An international collaboration between The National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, the Belgian National Film Archive and La Cinémathèque française will enable the new restoration of one of the few ghost stories to have survived from the silent film era. There is only one known remaining copy of the film and it features richly tinted images. Adapted from a novel written by Phantom of the Opera author Gaston Leroux, the film will be presented in a new 4K edition as part of A Season of Classic Films.
Launch event at Cannes
The Cannes A Season of Classic Films presentation and award of the Joint Restoration Grant took place 19 May at 10am at the Dutch Pavilion in Cannes. The event was moderated by Paulina Reizi (Eye Filmmuseum, Coordinator of A Season of Classic Films). Special guests included Sarah Brunet (Policy Officer, MEDIA and Audiovisual Support Programmes, DG Connect, European Commission), Michal Bregant (ACE President), Olivier Père (General Director ARTE France) and Cecilia Barrionuevo (Film at Lincoln Center – Programmer at-large / ECAM Industria).
Joint Film Restoration Grant 2023 – Jury Members
CECILIA BARRIONUEVO – film curator and educator
Cecilia Barrionuevo is currently Head of Seminars and International Relations at the Madrid Film School (ECAM) and film programmer at Lincoln Center. Barrionuevo was the artistic director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival (2018 – 2021) and a member of the festival’s programming team since 2010. Barrionuevo also co-edited several publications, including the bilingual collection of “Las Naves Cine”, and has taught film classes around the world. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Film Study Center at Harvard University. In 2020, she was awarded with the honorary title of Chevalier of the Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.
SAODAT ISMAILOVA – filmmaker
Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker, based in Tashkent and Paris. She is an important voice within the first generation of Central Asian artists to come of age in the post-Soviet era. She studied film and has made fiction films and documentaries, which have won awards at various international festivals. Her work focusses on the intersection of cinema and visual art. The use of archival footage is a recurring feature of Ismailova’s work. Her films and artwork have been featured in the Venice Biennale, Documenta (Kassel), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Berlin International Film Festival, Stedelijk Museum and Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam).
RADU JUDE – filmmaker
Radu Jude is one of the most renowned European directors of today. His work has been recognised with numerous awards from international film festivals, including the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn in 2021 and the Silver Berlin Bear for Aferim! in 2015 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Jude graduated from the Film Directing Department of the Media University of Bucharest. He started his career as a director’s assistant, including for films by Costa-Gavra and Cristi Puiu. Jude also directed several award-winning short films, among them The Tube with a Hat (2006) – the most successful Romanian short film ever. Most recently, his short film The Potemkinists was screened in 2022 at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes.
OLIVIER PÈRE – General Director ARTE France Cinéma
Olivier Père joined the French Cinémathèque in 1995, and soon became in charge of the programme, organising numerous retrospectives. Since 1997, he has been writing for the cultural publication “Les Inrockuptibles” on film and television programmes. Between 2004 and 2009, Père headed the Directors’ Fortnight, independent section at the Cannes Film Festival. From 2009 until 2012, he served as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival. In 2012, he became General Director of ARTE France Cinéma. He is also the Artistic Director of ArteKino and collaborates with the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes for the ArteKino Classics programme.
Today, 20 March 2023, ARTE launched the second edition of ArteKino Classics. Under this label, ARTE will be showing rarely seen European films – true gems of the 7th art – as part of its linear and non-linear catalogue.
This year’s programme includes some 20 films, including major works by Hungarian director Márta Mészáros, Swedish director Mai Zetterling and Czech director Vera Chytilová. This eclectic collection will be broadcast in Germany and France and made available online at arte.tv, where a rotation of films will be available throughout Europe with subtitles in six European languages.
Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker, which brought Isabelle Huppert to the attention of a wider audience, will open the festivities on the TV channel.
With this initiative – a hitherto unique event for public television – ARTE is taking a fresh look at the history of European cinema from 1945 to 1995. The programme invites European audiences to (re)discover both popular classics and films that broke new ground in cinematography and social discourse. Making them available online and in multiple languages also allows new and younger audiences to discover classic films easily.
Since last year, ArteKino Classics has been an integral part of ArteKino, which, together with ArteKino Festival and ArteKino Selection, has been presenting young European filmmakers and their take on our times since 2016, providing a bridge between the young cinema of today and heritage cinema.
The ARTE Group selects the works, in cooperation with the Association of European Cinematheques (ACE). All these films have been recently restored, many of them in the framework of ACE’s A Season of Classic Films, and about one third of them were made by women.
Supported by the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme, the ArteKino project is delivered by the ARTE Group and ACE.
Join the conversation on social media using the #ArteKinoClassics hashtag!
The National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive is happy to share that our latest restoration Szürkület /Twilight (1990) by György Fehér will have its world premiere as part of Berlinale Classics.
For those heading to the Berlinale this year, please feel very welcome to join us for this ArteKino panel discussion at theDeutsche Kinemathek!
Monday, 20.02.2023, 15:00-16:00 Veranstaltungsraum 4. Etage, Deutsche Kinemathek
Panel: Nadav Lapid (Filmregisseur / Berlinale Retrospektive), Olivier Père (ARTE France), Nina Goslar (ARTE / ZDF), Michal Bregant (ACE / Národní filmový archiv, Prague), Paulina Reizi (ACE / Eye Filmmuseum). Moderation: Elisa Jochum (Deutsche Kinemathek).
Being young in today’s world means growing up with digital technology; in the past few years, the younger generation has also developed a renewed consciousness of socio-political issues. At the intersection of these two developments, digitally restored films on – and from – past societal transformations bear the potential to enrich cultural discourse. ArteKino Classics, a new pan-European streaming venture of ARTE, with a special focus on the modern film heritage of 1945-1995, tries to realize this potential. Over a period of three months, ARTE provides 20 national film classics from almost as many European countries with subtitles in six languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish). The 20 recently restored films were selected in close consultation with the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE). The programme invites a young European audience to (re)discover both popular classics and films that broke new ground in cinematography and social discourse.
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