The 27th of October saw the celebration of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, a key initiative for both UNESCO and the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) to honor audiovisual preservation professionals and institutions that safeguard our heritage for future generations. Around the world audiovisual archives join together annually on this day to celebrate their work with events that not only highlight the vulnerability of these valuable materials, but also to celebrate the often, unheralded work of the institutions that provide protection and preservation, ensuring their availability in the future. This year the theme of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage was“Your Window to the World”.
Here you can find the initiatives organised by ACE members for the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage:
Albanian National Film Archive
This year the celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2020 in Tirana, Albania was marked with the beginning of the Albanian National Film Archive (AQSHF) collaboration with the distinguished POLIS University. During this academic year, the master program students of the POLIS University will design various proposals and projects on how the archive can be better equipped for the challenges that it faces as the sole custodian archival institution of the Albanian film heritage.
Gosfilmofond
How did the main Russian film archive begin? Yevgeny Margolit, a film historian, talks about the first big film that ended up becoming the starting point for founding Gosfilmofond.
National Audiovisual Institute (Helsinki, Finland)
THE GREAT VICTORIAN MOVING PICTURE SHOW (1895–1901)
The archive celebrated with a special lecture and a compilation of rare early films with a piano accompaniment. For more information on the films that were screened during the event, click here.
Národní filmový archiv
National film archive’s curator Jiří Horníček shall present a collection of homemade movies, which NFA obtained last year during the annual Home Movie Day event. He chose several five minutes fragments screens sharing a common subject – Family in motion.
This selection served as the Home Movie Day program in Cinema Ponrepo this year.
https://nfa.cz/cz/kino-ponrepo/program/#d27-s1-f31792
Deutsche Kinemathek
This year’s festival is dedicated to the significant contribution that transnational cooperation in archiving and restoring has made to preserving film heritage. The program will feature new restorations, made possible by the lively exchange and cooperation between various European archives and will be complemented with a range of presentations about restoration work, lectures, and panel discussions.
Due to the Corona Pandemic, Film Restored will therefore take place as a hybrid festival live on location and online. The events of the festival (workshop reports, panel discussions and introductions to the films) will be streamed and broadcast on the archive’s website: www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/de/besuch/festivals-symposien/filmrestored05
A large number of films from the festival program and a bonus program are accessible on the streaming site – though with geographical restrictions (“geoblocking”).
https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/en/visit/festivals-symposiums/filmrestored05
Filmoteca Valenciana – Institut Valencià de Cultura
The Filmoteca Valenciana is celebrating the recurrence with three screenings:
- El sol del mebrillo on October 27th restored by Filmoteca de Catalunya in 2017 with the supervision of Víctor Erice.
- a compilation of amateur and home movies preserved in the Filmoteca’s archive to celebrate the Home Movie Day alongside the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on November 4th.
- The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (plus pre-film about the restoration) on November 4th, a compilation film of newly-restored rare images from the first years of filmmaking, presented by our colleagues from the Eye Filmmuseum and the British Film Institute with the support of the European Commission. These films are all photographed with the unique large-format 68mm Mutograph camera, which provided extraordinarily high-resolution images.
Eye Filmmuseum
Eye Filmmuseum has announced the forthcoming release of The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (1897-1902) on its new streaming platform Eye Film Playerᵇᵉᵗᵃ. Everybody can enjoy this film free of charge from the comfort of their home.
Eye Film Playerᵇᵉᵗᵃ offers free movies and rentals from the internationally renowned Eye collection. No account is needed to watch the selection of free films. The aim of Eye Film Player is to share the treasures from the collection online, so that they can be discovered and enjoyed by everyone. As of November 2020, new titles will be added on a monthly basis. The official worldwide launch of the Eye Film Player is scheduled for January 2021.
https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/the-brilliant-biograph
IFI Irish Film Archive
To celebrate World Day for Audio Visual Heritage the IFI Irish Film Archive is celebrating the work of Academy Award nominated filmmaker Patrick Carey, specifically his 1970 short film Errigal.
To accompany the film which is featured on the IFI’s online platform the IFI Player, Archive staff member Gavin Martin has written a blog discussing his work scanning and remastering this observational and reflective work.
Bulgarian National Film Archive
The Bulgarian National Film Archive has presented some of its collection at the archival cinema Odeon in Sofia. The program featured 6 silent short films created in Bulgaria from 1933 to 1940:
The Fire Brigade – 1938, 14’
Enjoy Shumensko Pivo – 1940, Dir. Spas Totev, 14’
A Trip Around Chepino – 1933, Dir. Stefan Petrov, 25’
Fashionable Hairstyle Day – 3’
Queen of the Beach Contest at the Lujene Beach – 1940, Dir. Spas Totev, 7’
The Region of Dobrudzha – 1940, 9’
Filmoteca Española
The Filmoteca Española ha decided to celebrate the day with the screening of video footage from the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic on April 14th 1931. This video will be accompanied by other materials.
https://https://entradasfilmoteca.gob.es/FichaPelicula.aspx?id=1&idPelicula=1255
The Filmoteca Catalunya has made available on their Youtube Channel Notes sur l’émigration – Espagne 1960 by Jacinto Esteva and Paolo Brunatto
The film archive also has screened El Último Sabado by Pere Balañà i Bonvehí, (1966) and a selection of restored short movies conserved at the Centre de Conservació i Restauració (2CR).
https://www.filmoteca.cat/web/ca/cicle/dia-mundial-del-patrimoni-audiovisual-2020
Filmoteca Española
The Filmoteca Española has made available online Pontevedra, cuna de Colón (Enrique Barreiro, 1927), a short documentary that is the first film shot in color in Spain thanks to an experimental system patented by Barreiro himself in 1925: the Cromacolor. The archive has succeeded in recovering the original colors of this pioneering work.
Here you can find information on the restoration work and here you can view Pontevedra.
Slovenian Cinematheque
In collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA Ljubljana, the archive has presented a program of experimental and avantgarde short films made in Belgrade between 1959 and 1989.