Film Restored – The Film Heritage Festival

Keynote
Elisa Jochum (Deutsche Kinemathek)
In English

A community can be defined as ‘we’, ‘you’ or ‘they’, depending on the perspective. And equally, each of these pronouns can carry different implications: solidarity or exclusion, freedom or discrimination, strength or vulnerability, the unanimity or diversity of voices, the end of solitude or collective loneliness.

This year’s keynote address at the Film Restored Festival looks at film history as a universe made up of communities – or, to borrow a mathematical term, as a Venn diagram that connects an infinite number of circles. Each community is dynamic and the fringes are often the most complex – and insightful.

This address will close by posing a set of questions and extends an invitation to the audience to take these with them into the festival week.

Lecture
Jillian Borders (UCLA Film & Television Archive)
In English

The roots of the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television reach back to the 1940s. In 1974, three female graduate students created the UCLA Women’s Film Workshop as a way to gain access to the California Institute of Women, the largest US women’s prison at the time. Over six months, they led a Portapak video workshop that brought female inmates’ voices to the outside world, revealing the community inside the prison. The issues discussed by these women continue to resonate in contemporary prison abolition movements.

Workshop report
Stefan Drößler (Filmmuseum München)
In German

‘Torre Bela’ is a legendary documentary about an occupation that took place during the ‘Revolution of the Carnations’ in the 1970s when farmers took over the property of a duke. Thomas Harlan filmed the entire process and subsequently produced various versions of his film. In a joint effort, the Cinemateca Portuguesa and the Munich Film Archive have tried to restore the final version that Thomas Harlan authorised a few years ago.

Lecture
Daria Chernyak, Jiří Horníček (both Národní filmový archiv, Prague)
In English

In 1932, the first amateur filmmakers’ club, the Pathé, was founded in Prague. The requirement for membership was knowing how to use the 9.5mm film format, a prerequisite that served as a strong unifying element at the outset of the club’s existence. This presentation will look at how the club was founded before exploring its other activities, such as publishing a specialised Czech magazine and building a clubroom. The second part focuses on the practices of Pathé club members and aims to reconstruct the technical workflow of its independent film lab in the 1930s.

Lecture
Andy Räder (Universität Greifswald)
In German

Lower and Upper Lusatia are home to the Sorbs or Wends, the smallest Slavic ethnic group in Europe. In the GDR, they were the only recognised national minority. Their contribution to film history is largely unknown. Between 1980 and 1992, almost forty works were created by the Sorbian film production group within the DEFA, based in Bautzen. For the first time, films could be shot in Sorbian, and the community’s concerns were anchored in the collective consciousness of the non-Sorbian population in East Germany. This support of an ethnic minority in film was unique, but it was never on an equal footing.

Workshop report
Clément Lafite (Università degli Studi di Udine), Alessandro Russo (Università degli Studi di Padua), Annabelle Aventurin (film archivist and curator)
In English

This workshop report discusses the retrieval of ‘Ballade aux sources’ (FR 1965), initiated in 2018 by Ciné-Archives (Paris), and the research activity carried out to identify the film’s original elements that were previously absent in official filmographies. The workshop also presents the workflow of the digital restoration that was carried out by La Camera Ottica Lab of the University of Udine and the Centro Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) of the University of Padua and which tackled issues related to the chemical and physical degradation of the original magnetic soundtrack.

Panel discussion
Björn Koll (Queere Kulturstiftung), Birgit Bosold (Schwules Museum) and a user of the archive
Moderation: Daniel Meiller (Deutsche Kinemathek)
In German

Queerness has a manifold history – but is it preserved in safe spaces, accessible to all? This panel discussion will shed light on the concept of the ‘queer archive’ from various angles:

Archiving queerness: Queer films and other testimonies from queer lives often come from a precarious, fragile or threatened context. How does an archive become a safe space?

Queering archives: What makes an archive a queer archive? What shortcomings do existing archiving standards and structures have?

Using queer archives: How do researchers, curators and individuals gain access to queer archives and how does their knowledge flow back into these archives?

Lecture
Lea Wohl von Haselberg (media scholar and curator), Johannes Praetorius-Rhein (film scholar and sociologist)
In German

Jewish film is still a young but dynamic field of research – ‘Jewish film heritage’, on the other hand, represents a gap that needs to be filled. Situated between the discourses on film heritage and Jewish cultural heritage, no institutions are currently dedicated to collecting, archiving and distributing Jewish film heritage – and yet it is produced in a variety of discursive ways. This project, funded by the German Research Foundation, provides foundational research by mapping the field through the development of a database, analysing different discursive strategies and researching forgotten materials of Jewish film heritage.

An event of the Prize of the Association of German Cinematheques

Panel discussion
Audrey Biasucci (Filmgruppe Zelluloid 42), Patrick Holzapfel (Jugend ohne Film), Malve Lippman and Can Sungu (Cinema of Commoning)
Moderation: Diana Kluge (Deutsche Kinemathek)
In German

Provocative 35mm cinema, a global network of alternative film initiatives, a nascent community of film critics with a focus on film history and a range of ways in which to watch film, both online and offline: three examples of alternative communities will be discussed in this practical panel discussion. After short introductions to the respective projects, the focus will be on questions relating to conditions for development as well as challenges and prospects for the future.

An event of the Prize of the Association of German Cinematheques

For the 25th time this year, repertory cinemas and filmculture initiatives will be awarded the association’s prize.Repertory cinemas are characterised by their close tieswith their local communities and the close connectionsbetween the movie-goers that frequent them. The supportingprogramme for the association’s prize exploreshow communities might be strengthened in the cinemalandscape. The Honorary Prize of the Association ofGerman Cinematheques will be awarded to directorHelke Sander.

Please register for the event at: registration_fr [at] deutsche-kinemathek.de

With DJ Barış Cengiz
Deutsche Kinemathek, event space, 4th floor

is a film archivist and worked from 2020 to late 2023 on the preservation and distribution of Med Hondo’s films at Ciné-Archives, the film collection of the French Communist Party and the workers’ movement. She is also a film programmer. In 2022, she directed her first documentary, ‘Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin’ (30’), which has been shown at nearly fifty festivals and venues.

was born in Lyon and has worked at the Lumière Film Festival. Most recently, she curated and moderated meetings and worked as a community manager there. Her influences mainly come from alternative film culture, represented by genre film festivals like Terza Visione and the Hofbauerkongress. She is also a longstanding member of the DIY music scene and has recently joined the Filmrauschpalast in Berlin-Moabit.

is the Head of Preservation for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the largest university-based collection of moving images. She began her career at UCLA’s film lab before joining the preservation department in 2013. Jillian oversees the photochemical and digital restorations of a broad range of titles, from classic Hollywood to independent films. Jillian earned her BA in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and her MA in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA.

is a board member of the Schwules Museum Berlin (SMU). With a focus on programme and finances, she was instrumental in the development of the SMU as (co-) curator of projects such as ‘Homosexualität_en’ (2015/16) or most recently ‘Aufarbeiten: Sexualisierte Gewalt gegen Kinder und Jugendliche im Zeichen von Emanzipation’ (2023/24). She switched careers to work in the financial sector, has worked at renowned banks and is now a freelance financial planner and investment expert.

is motion picture preservationist and film restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. Working with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations of more than forty feature films and numerous short subjects. He writes and lectures regularly on topics related to media archaeology and, audio-visual conservation. Byrne is the founder of the San Francisco Film Preserve and for the past twenty years has served on the board of directors of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

is an experimental filmmaker and archivist. She studied cinematography at the VGIK Moscow and editing at FAMU Prague. For the 9.5mm project, she investigates technological aspects of amateur filmmaking, such as film processing, printing and editing.

has headed the Filmmuseum München since 1999. Active in film club work since 1977, he has organised festivals, retrospectives and film series for museums, the Volkshochschule, universities and congresses, as well as founding and directing the Bonn Cinematheque (1986–1999) and the Bonn Silent Film Festival (1985–2020). As a film restorer, he works on silent films, multi-version films and 3D cinema as well as the work of Thomas Harlan, Katja Raganelli, Werner Schroeter, Katrin Seybold, Orson Welles and others.

is a filmmaker, producer, film archivist and restorer. He is the founder of the Film Heritage Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of India’s cinematic heritage, and the director of the Mumbai Film Festival. His first feature documentary ‘Celluloid Man’ (2012) won two national awards. His second documentary ‘The Immortals’ (2015) won the Special Jury Award at the MIFF in 2016. His third documentary titled ‘CzechMate – In Search of Jiri Menzel’ was voted one of the top five releases in 2020 by the British Film Institute and ‘Sight & Sound’ Magazine.

is a senior curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). She manages the NFSA Restores Program and delivers projects derived from the NFSA Collection such as the commission of the film ‘Winhanganha’ (2023) with Wiradjuri artist Jazz Money. She has worked in the film and television industry for over thirty years including roles as an events and film festival administrator, programmer and director at Screen Australia, as well as writer/producer, teacher, and in film exhibition and distribution.

is the Head of Film Distribution at the Deutsche Kinemathek. After studying German and philosophy in Berlin, she worked for the Basis-Film distribution company and as a writer. Since 2005 she has been responsible for cinema and festival distribution at the Deutsche Kinemathek. As part of this activity, she initiates and organises film series and events. Hahn has also been the project manager and programme coordinator of the Film Restored film heritage festival since its creation in 2017 and has been responsible for the Deutsche Kinemathek’s streaming programme ‘Selects’ since 2022.

is the Programme Coordinator and member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Retrospective and Berlinale Classics at the Deutsche Kinemathek. Previously, she was an editor in the communication department and then a curatorial assistant and research assistant in the exhibition team. Her research focuses on how work and workers were portrayed in National Socialist feature films.

works in the fields of literature, curation and journalism. He is the editor of the online and print magazine ‘Jugend ohne Film’. His debut novel ‘Ermine on Benches’ was published in 2024, and he is also the winner of the 2022 Open Mike Competition for Young Literature. In 2016, he was a Siegfried Kracauer Fellow of the Association of German Film Critics, nominated for the 2022 Siegfried Kracauer Prize for Best Film Criticism, and in the same year, he received a Start fellowship in literature from the Federal Chancellery of Austria.

is a curator and film historian at Národní filmový archiv in Prague, and focuses on the acquisition and preservation of amateur and family films. He cooperates with the archival association Inedits: Amateur Films/Memory of Europe. He is also the co-editor of a monograph about Ludvík Šváb, (‘Ludvík Šváb: Tidy Up After I Die’, 2017) who was a Czech amateur and experimental filmmaker, and member of the Prague Surrealistic Group. Horníček also participates in film conferences (such as ‘9.5mm: And Cinema Is Everywhere’ – Lichtspiel Bern, 2022).

is a film scholar and cultural historian. She has been the Head of the Film Heritage Department (Film Archive) at the Deutsche Kinemathek since 2022 and has been teaching on the subject of women in media history at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg since 2020. She has previously worked and/or carried out research at the Goethe-Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University College London and Yale University.

studied communication and media studies, cultural studies and business administration in Leipzig and Manchester. She then worked in the curatorial and organisational field for national and international film festivals and cultural organisations such as the Goethe-Institut in Wellington, Tiff Bell Lightbox in Toronto and the Cottbus Film Festival. Since 2015, she has worked in cinema and festival distribution at the Deutsche Kinemathek. In addition, she is a programme curator for the Down Under Film Festival, among others.

left for West Berlin in 1988 to study theatre studies, business administration and psychology after finishing school and his military service. He made his own short films, did internships at the Theater des Westens and the Deutsche Oper, organised concerts and began working with Manfred Salzgeber. From 1990 to 2023, he was Head of the Salzgeber Film Distribution Company and released over 600 films. The breadth of Salzgeber’s film distribution is diverse, ranging from queer cinema to documentary film, young directors and world cinema. Koll is currently working on art and book projects and, as a board member of the Queere Kulturstiftung, is particularly committed to building a queer film archive in Berlin. He is also the organiser of the Queer Film Festival that takes place throughout Germany and editor of ‘sissy’, a non-heterosexual culture magazine.

is a film archivist and PhD student in Film Studies at the Università degli Studi di Udine. He has collaborated with different film archives including the EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Ciné-Archives (Paris) and Cineteca Nazionale (Rome). He has worked as a project coordinator for film festivals such as the Venice International Film Festival and is currently collaborating with the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Lafite also teaches techniques in film restoration at the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema in Rome.

is an artist, curator and cultural manager. She studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and the Universität der Künste Berlin and has worked as a scenographer for numerous opera and theatre productions throughout the world. Since 2010, she has worked as a curator and cultural manager and taken part in various cultural and community projects. She is the co-founder and artistic director of bi’bak and Sinema Transtopia in Berlin. She directed various programmes, events and exhibitions such as the international symposium ‘Cinema of Commoning’ (2022/2024), and the documentary exhibition projects ‘Sıla Yolu. The Holiday Transit to Turkey and the Tales of the Highway’ (2016–17) and ‘Bitter Things. Narratives and Memories of Transnational Families’ (2018–2022).

is the Managing Archivist at the Yale Film Archive, where he oversees acquisition, conservation, preservation and access to print and pre-print material in the film archive. Prior to Yale, he worked at the Harvard Film Archive and as Public Access Coordinator and Short Film Preservationist at the Academy Film Archive. A graduate of the Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House, he also sits on the Board of Directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.

has an MA in Romance and Comparative Literature. He completed his studies in film editing at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. He worked as a freelance editor for documentaries and feature films for eleven years, and as a film restorer at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, from 2006 to 2008. Since 2008, he has been Head of the Audiovisual Collections at the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

is a multi-award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries have been screened around the world. His credits include ‘Lousy Little Sixpence’ (1983), a seminal film on the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and ‘Admission Impossible’ (1992), an investigation into the controversial ‘White Australia’ immigration policies. His latest documentary feature, ‘Ablaze’ (2021), traces the journey of Indigenous opera singer Tiriki Onus to find the ‘lost films’ made in the 1940s by his grandfather, Aboriginal rights leader William Onus, and it has won numerous international prizes.

is a film scholar and sociologist. After studying theatre, film and media studies and sociology in Frankfurt am Main and Brussels, he began a doctorate funded by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES) on Artur Brauner’s films against forgetting, which is about to be completed. From 2019 to 2022, together with Lea Wohl von Haselberg, he coordinated the German-Jewish Film History of the Federal Republic network, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). As a research associate at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, he worked on the ViCTOR-E project for non-fictional film of the post-war period, which is part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) network. Since 2022, he has been setting up the Jewish film heritage research database.

is a research associate at the Institute for Politics and Communication Science at the Universität Greifswald. He received his doctorate at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf with a thesis on the television director Ulrich Thein and GDR TV drama. His current research interests are media history, GDR film and television, minorities and marginalised film cultures, children’s film and digital humanities. His most recent publications include ‘Sorbische Filmlandschaften. Serbske filmowe krajiny’ (2024) with Grit Lemke; he is also the co-editor of the book ‘Der 5. Kanal’ (2024) as part of the Uwe Johnson edition of works by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW).

has been the Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek and Head of the Retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival since 2006. From 1991 to 2006, he was director of the Zeughauskino at Deutsches Historisches Museum, where he also curated exhibitions, including ‘The German Empire of Images. Ufa 1917–1945’ and ‘Historic Site: Olympic Grounds 1909–1936– 2006’. He has written and/or edited numerous publications, most recently ‘No Angels – Mae West’, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard (2021) and ‘Der deutsche Film – von 1985 bis heute’ (2023).

lives and works in Berlin. He studied visual communication as well as art and media at the Universität der Künste Berlin and spent one year at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires (2002–10). Since 2011, he has been the director of archival projects at the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, managing film digitisation and restoration projects. He is also training in the field of film archiving and preservation.

is a sound restorer and currently a PhD student at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) of the Università di Padova. His main research activities concern the preservation of audio documents, films and multimedia art installations. Since 2016, he has carried out research activities in collaboration with the CSC that mainly focus on audio restoration, and with La Camera Ottica of the Università degli Studi di Udine, involving work on several digitisation and restoration projects in collaboration with numerous Italian and international archives.

studied film and was an activist at the Frauenkino Xenia for many years. Since the early 1990s, she has been working as a film critic for ‘Cinema Jahrbuch’, ‘Filmbulletin’ and ‘Art-TV’. From 2001 to 2020/21, she was the co-director and co-curator of the queer film festival Pink Apple in Zurich and Frauenfeld. Senn is the editor of the book ‘Frauenkino Xenia – Zürich’ (2024).

is a curator, researcher and writer. He studied film, interdisciplinary arts and visual communication design in Istanbul and Berlin. As the co-founder and artistic director of bi’bak and Sinema Transtopia in Berlin, he curated various programmes, events and exhibitions such as the symposium ‘Cinema of Commoning’ (2022/2024), the documentary exhibition projects ‘Sıla Yolu. The Holiday Transit to Turkey and the Tales of the Highway’ (2016–17) and ‘Bitter Things. Narratives and Memories of Transnational Families’ (2018–2022). He has worked as a juror and consultant for the Berlinale Forum, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Duisburger Filmwoche, Berlin’s Capital Cultural Fund and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme, among others. He has co-edited several books. From 2020–23, he was on the curatorial team of ‘Fiktionsbescheinigung’ at the Berlinale Forum – a film programme that broadens German film history by adding intersectional perspectives. Since 2023 he has been a curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.

is an artist and director. Her experimental debut ‘Mano Destra’ (1986) became a cult film and brought her international acclaim. The film was shown several times in Zurich’s Frauenkino Xenia and circulated in the feminist subculture of the 1980s and 1990s. In her other photographic and cinematic works, such as ‘Museum of Modern Art’ (1988), Uebelmann also deals in the abstract with questions of sexuality and gender.

is a film scholar and archivist and works as Head of Education and Outreach at the Cinémathèque suisse in Zurich. Together with Jenny Billeter and Emanuel Signer, she curated the programme ‘Xenia Retrospective – Kino machen, feministisch’ at the Xenix cinema in Zurich in 2023.

is a media scholar and curator; she researches Jewish film history, Holocaust film and audiovisual cultures of remembrance. She did her doctorate in Hamburg and Haifa and has led various research projects at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf since 2017, where she is developing the Memory Media Lab. She is the co-editor of the magazine ‘Yalta. Positionen zur Jüdischen Gegenwart’ and the programme director of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg (JFBB).

studied economics and subsequently worked at various museums. Since 1999, he has been a research associate at the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main and is the Head of the Film Archive and Film Technology Collection there. He is also responsible for film restorations and DVD productions and is involved in developing film history exhibitions. Since 2013, he has been responsible for the DFF’s digitisation projects.

studied communication science and management in Erfurt, Oslo and Leipzig. In 2017, he wrote his MA thesis on ‘Online-Kommunikationsstrategien in der Filmwirtschaft – Vermarktungsmöglichkeiten von Kinospielfilmen in Deutschland’. In addition to his studies, he worked for the DEFA Foundation in Berlin for many years; since 2020, he has directed the public relations department there. In this position, he gives film introductions and writes film history texts.

is a film and media scholar. She works as a curator, moderator, editor, lecturer and writer in the field of film and cinema culture. Her archive-based curatorial work focuses on historical representations and medialities of historiography, European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, historical and present-day feminisms, and war and trauma in film. Her film programmes are shown in numerous cinemas and at film festivals in Germany and internationally.