Home Movie Day 2024

Each October, many institutions involved in the preservation and research of visual and audiovisual heritage celebrate International Home Movie Day around the world. This holiday is intended to highlight the issue of preserving home archives, as well as to bring together local communities to share their own films and memories of the past.

This year, we are once again joining the International Home Movie Day, and we invite you to join us for a screening of the latest findings of the Urban Media Archive

From year to year, the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History acquires new archives of home and amateur films shot on small film cameras. Although this genre is quite conventional and often allows us to predict what was shot on private 8 or 16 mm film, usually family moments, childhood, travel, leisure, and recreation, each frame contains personal stories and life trajectories. Once captured moments are now becoming valuable sources in the digital archive, allowing us to study the past through moving images, and preserving the fragile memory of the past.

This year's acquisitions include private and public archives from different regions of Ukraine and even continents. These are rural comedies by Dmytro Kozel from Rozhdestvenske in Chernihiv region, family chronicles from Zaporizhzhia and Crimea, accidentally found films from travels to Paris in the 1970s, and even home movies by Sofia Yablonska from her life in Indochina in the 1930s. So our next screening will be a journey through time, space, and interesting memories from the authors and participants of the films.

Credits

Cover Image: Collection of Oleksandr Makhanets (found film) // Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History