Programme dedicated to home movies “Of Home and Friends”  

Were we to think of cinema outside the constrains of professional practices and movie studios, and instead consider the totality of footage recorded on camera, we would realize that the archive of moving images is dominated by unfettered and lighthearted works by amateur movie makers. In the 20^th century filming home movies was a widespread family practice, while a movie camera was a used to record important moments and served as a tool for self-expression. A personal film archive provided a reason for families to gather for home movie screenings, wheras the Soviet festivals of home movies attracted a larger community of cinephiles. In her 1965 essay “Amateur versus Professional” avantgarde filmmaker Maya Deren notes that the main reason for creating home movies is the love its author feels towards the practive of filming and the subjects of the camera’s gaze. Enthusiasm, spontaneity, and the waning margin between the filmer and his or hers environment are the traits that define home movies, that in turn might suggest the way to appreciate such material today.

The cinema and media center “Meno Avilys” began engaging with amateur cinema and home movies when they participated in an international project “Cinememoire” alongside the independent analogue film collective “Super 8 Picnic in a Hand”. Throughout the duration of this initiative they digitized and thus saved amateur films and home movies from the 1960s up to 1980s that depicts fragments of everyday life, as well as moments of celebration and respite. These are unique and anthropologically worthwhile witnesses of the relationship between the people and their environment throughout that period.

During the special screening on the September 29, a fragment of this archive kept at “Meno avilys” will be presented alongside the material digitized more recently. Free entrance.