The North East public are being asked to check their lofts, attics and cellars for any old amateur films for the annual Home Movie Day on Saturday 12 August. The Home Move Day is an international celebration of home-made moving images which began in 2003 in the USA. Now running in five countries and across 28 US states, the Northern Region Film and Television Archive (NRFTA) at the University of Teesside is one of only two UK venues to be screening a selection of films. The second venue is The Cinema Museum in London.
Brian Barker, Film Archive Education Officer at the NRFTA, said: "We aim to raise awareness of the cultural and historical importance of amateur films and ensure that home movie collections continue to be preserved and shown.
"Home movies of family events like weddings and christenings provide interesting social documents of the times that they took place. Some footage can have much wider importance, such as the colour films of street scenes in Nazi Germany shot by a Middlesbrough dentist while on holiday in pre-war Germany. As well as viewing these often fascinating films we would also like to arrange to catalogue and store them in our environmentally controlled archive facility at the University."
The NRFTA team request that all films are submitted at least one week prior to the screening on Saturday 12 August to the School of Arts & Media, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough Tower, off Borough Road, Middlesbrough. To find out more about submitting your films, call Brian Barker on 01642 384022, email: b.barker@tees.ac.uk or visit www.nrfta.org.uk.