We invite you to a film screening in celebration of International Home Movie Day, so that—together with the filmmakers and participants in the films from the Urban Media Archive’s collections—we can recall how these films were made and how we used to watch them with family and friends.
Every year, Home Movie Day brings together institutions that preserve and make public private and amateur film archives. Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History continuously collects and digitizes films on 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm film reels free of charge. Digital copies bring back to life memories of family and private daily life that might otherwise remain inaccessible to their owners without the necessary viewing equipment. At the same time, digitization helps preserve the film reels themselves, which are damaged with every viewing and gradually deteriorate even during long-term storage.
Home and amateur films capture daily life and living spaces, leisure activities, workplaces, and everyday routines. In these films, the documentation of important private events is often combined with creative projects, in which the filmmakers enlisted the help of family members, friends, and colleagues. Today, these films serve as a testament to everyday life and the visual culture of the 1960s–1990s.
This year’s program of joint screenings from home film archives includes “peeking in” on colleagues at the police station from Mykhailo Banakh’s collection, family walks near greenhouses from Katarzyna Loza’s collection, vacationing in the mountains from Malgorzata Ruszela’s collection, mushroom picking in Cherkasy on found footage from Oleksandr Makhanets’s collection, a comedic sketch about back-to-school preparations from Markiyan Hrab’s collection, as well as an environmental film by the “Horyn” folk film studio.
Home Movie Day
Center for Urban History has been hosting Home Movie Days regularly since 2016. For us, it’s an opportunity to showcase the digitized collections of the Urban Media Archive and watch them together with the filmmakers and participants. It’s also an effort to highlight the importance of preserving family archives, even if they’re stored on outdated media.
This year Home Movie Day is presented as part of the public program “From Place to Place: Stories from Scattered Archives” of the “REHERIT 2.0: Common Responsibility for Shared Heritage” project.
The “REHERIT 2.0” project is implemented by the Center for Urban History and the “Regional Development” Center of the PPV Economic Development Agency with financial support from the European Union.
Cover Image: Still frame from the 8 mm film / Cherkasy / 1980s / Oleksandr Makhanets’ collection
