Don't Let Your Film Decay

This Saturday is international Home Movie Day and for the first time, Northern Ireland will be taking part! Hosted by our UTV archive partners, PRONI, the day celebrates amateur film making in all its forms and formats - 8 mm, 16 mm, VHS: whatever you've got, we want to see it - and more importantly, to let you see it! If you've a stack of old footage gathering dust in the attic, with faces you're in danger of forgetting, or escapades you've talked into legend captured on camera, why not bring it by and see it once again? Although we won't be screening everything that comes in, we can also offer tips and advice on repair, storage, and format transfer.

(This is just one example of the gorgeous home movies that we hold in the archive: the Carrey family demonstrating their hardiness on those freezing beaches mentioned below!)

One of the firendly folk helping out at our drop-in evenings is professional film-maker and film enthusiast Vincent Kinnaird, whose recently launched exhibition, 'Gareth in Belfast,' is a celebration of all that is good about 'shoot from the hip' filmmaking, friendship, and Belfast itself. The moving images in Vincent's exhibition pay homage to the field of amateur filmmaking, and its twin subjects - Gareth and Belfast itself - remind us that capturing our personal histories also allows us to capture a broader sense of change. This is true of so much of the footage in the Digital Film Archive: reels of family holidays on the freezing beaches of Northern Ireland remind us of a time when the world was smaller, by necessity; amateur footage by train, tram and trolley bus enthusiasts shows us the changes in how we travel; the parties, picnics, and play of home movies throughout the period of the Troubles shows us clearly that there was always another side to life in Northern Ireland, no matter what the news cameras saw.

The event is free and open to all, so dust off those reels and pop down to PRONI to pay us a visit and see what treasures have been hidden up in your attic all these years!