Ciak: history passes through the dining room

It all originates in an underground way, just like the family films that the Fondazione Home Movies, the National Archive of Family Film in Bologna, has been collecting since the early 2000s. Home Movies is the first archive in Italy entirely dedicated to the preservation, restoration and valorisation of private and amateur film and audiovisual heritage, with 40,000 films in 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm and Super8 formats from all over the country. A counterpart of the National Diary Archive in Pieve Santo Stefano, but in a visual and choral version. It is the meeting ground between private and public history through the free language of the family film. An awareness-raising, also stimulated by the work of artists who have been working with the reuse of these materials since the 1970s.

It was the current director, Paolo Simoni, who founded the Archive together with Mirco Santi, starting this adventure in 2000 out of passion. After the disappearance of cameras, films and projectors, it was time for recovery, since no one - neither archives, nor film libraries, nor universities, nor academies - was taking care of it. It was an operation not only to re-appropriate memory, but also films, in some cases of good aesthetic quality and certainly with an anodyne expressive force, which could explain the evolutionary force of an era. In 2002, the Association from which the Foundation sprang was established, experimenting with new digitisation technologies, first with artisanal machines and then increasingly sophisticated, developing protocols and recognition by the Mic in 2011. Those who discover at home that they have a small heritage in film can decide to donate it, but many films also come from territorial collections through public and private bodies. Thus Home Movies has come to house 1,800 film collections, the oldest of which is the Genoese Lavello, from 1925, this year its centenary. Slightly older, from 1924, instead, is the oldest film, a wedding in Rome of the D'Ambrogi Family Fund.

Today, material is drawn on for consultation, for studies, but also to make films or television series from scratch, one case in point being SanPa by Gianluca Neri on the San Patrignano rehabilitation community. There have also been films co-produced by Home Movies itself, such as Il varco by Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini on the Second World War, which won the Efa award for best editing, and Sguardi in camera, a forthcoming television series on the history of the 20th century. And then there is the direct address to young people, because the fundamental thing is to allow them to confront the past. For example, the city's Cinemappe project has seen seven institutes, encompassing the cycle from kindergarten to high school, work on the cinema as a tool for narrating the self and its territory. The youngest children tried their hand at inventing, cataloguing and interrogating 'found images'. While the older ones learnt to look at films also as a historical source, eventually producing a work that recorded the changing role of women in the last century.

In 2003, Simoni and Santi launched the Home Movie Day, a day when anyone could bring their own private film, which was 'restored live' and shown at the end of the day as a sharing of a story that began as the product of a small community, the family - in which everyone expresses their subjectivity, filming or being filmed -, but which with the public screening became collective. From this rib, the Archivio Aperto festival was born 18 years ago, directed by Vanessa Mangiavacca, Sergio Fant and Giulia Simi, with film screenings and an international competition. Inside, the Archive Lovers Labs with two projects designed for young students and scholars, filmmakers, curators of the moving image. The Archive Care for the under-30s, aimed at training new professional figures capable of interpreting and enhancing images in a contemporary key. And the Young Jury, for those under 26, called upon to vote for the best work in the international competition (candidatures are open until 6 July, archivioaperto.it). The next edition, the 18th, Time of Liberations, will take place between 26 and 30 September. This writer visited the venue in 2022 with Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, with whom the writer made Annie Ernaux - My Super 8 years. She had recently won the Nobel Prize. I remember her as, still stunned, she received the roar of applause that the city of Bologna gave her at the Medica cinema. The 850-plus-seat auditorium was overflowing with people, while outside a long queue waited in vain for a few spectators to leave before...

© REPRODUCTION RESERVED