Safeguarding Ukrainian Heritage of Amateur Films and Home Movies

This project aims to develop and extend the activities of the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History(opens in a new tab) to digitize and archive small gauge film collections held across Ukraine. Such materials are endangered because of the obsolete medium and the lack of understanding from younger generations about the value of this heritage.

The additional impetus to expedite the archiving of amateur filmmaking heritage comes from the high risk of loss caused by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Occupation of the territories, shelling of the civil infrastructure, economic and institutional crisis, and forced migration of the millions of people who were supposed to leave their belongings and escape from the war accelerated the process of deterioration of the forgotten heritage of amateur filmmakers.

This project will digitize amateur films and home movies that will become part of the Urban Media Archive collection. The first part of the archival material to be digitized within the project will be the films produced by the amateur filmmaking studio "Kameniar" of the Ukrainian Society of Deaf. The second part is the home movies from the private archives that will be collected via an open call.