Fondazione Home Movies

Founded in 2002 in Bologna, Fondazione Home Movies is the first archive in Italy entirely dedicated to the preservation, restoration and enhancement of Italy’s private, family, amateur, industrial and experimental film heritage: a heritage of immeasurable historical, social and cultural value otherwise at risk.

The Archives currently preserves in its spaces more than 35,000 small-format films acquired through private donations from all over the country or broader collection projects in collaboration with municipalities, institutions, foundations, and companies. This reservoir of filmed memories is returned to the community with numerous cultural activities-often in networks with institutions and universities-and digital accessibility projects with the goal of educating and promoting the culture of private and amateur cinema as a historical source, artistic product, cultural object and technological medium.

The heritage safeguarded by Home Movies constitutes a vast and valuable visual depository for Italian history of the 20th century: the transformations of the Italian landscape and social customs and changes of the last century. An immense, hidden treasure, made accessible to the entire community: pupils and students, scholars and scholars, school and university teachers, artists, artists and filmmakers, and citizens and citizens who simply want to immerse themselves in the images and landscapes of memory to discover or relive the universal feeling of “the way we were.”

The Home Movies Foundation team states that “the victory of the  Call for Proposals represents for us an important support to the diffusion and dissemination of the work of Home Movies and the preserved heritage, with a view to enabling the archive to increasingly out of its rooms and make its contents accessible with digital tools. History and microhistory are woven into a mosaic of portraits, looks and lives through the lens and involvement of filmmakers throughout the 20th century: our mission is to transmit this heritage to future generations so that it can be continually observed and interrogated with the eyes of the present.”