[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdB4B_OZXmY[/youtube]
In celebration of both its 20th Anniversary and World Day for Audio Visual Heritage, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) launched its first short film competition.
The challenge was "to create a film or video that conveys the importance of preserving the world’s moving image heritage."
The winner was Brian Rose’s quite moving His First Day, inspired "by the stories of dozens of films that would have been lost forever … were it not for a few individuals who thought they were worth saving. My own work owes a huge debt to the silent cinema, and I shudder to think what that work would be like, and what kind of person I would be, had someone not cared to save films like The Passion of Joan of Arc or practically anything by Buster Keaton.
"That is the ultimate message of my film: that one person’s decision to save a single film can have an untold and lasting impact on generations of filmmakers and film lovers. The lesson is that we cannot make the choice for them, deciding which films they shall know, and which films they shall only read about. It is for their sake that every film that can be saved must be saved!”
Susan Kennedy and Jon Steiner’s Get the Picture, which shows that reenactments are quite was effective as watching the real thing, was the runner-up.
Watch Get the Picture here: http://www.amianet.org/
The world premiere screening of His First Day will be held in Philadelphia next Friday, November 6, at AMIA’s Archival Screening Night at the Neighborhood Film Project at International House.