Homemade movies are something we tend to take for granted in this era of selfie culture. Flashback to the 1950s and super 8 film. And then, in the 80s and 90s, all of the home movies shot on videotape. It was a very different technology and a different way of documenting and archiving than we see nowadays.
Those films have mostly been regarded as private, family moments. They weren’t shared. Today we’re talking to the organizers of a project that is addressing what they see as a gap in our national archives. The national archive project Homemade Visible wants to get that archival footage out of people’s closets and into our national archives. They are focusing especially on home movies by Indigenous people and visible minorities.
Homemade Visible is a project of the Regent Park Film Festival in Toronto, in partnership with Charles Street Video. rabble radio host Victoria Fenner talked to Ananya Ohri, Artistic Director of Homemade Visible. She is also the Executive Director of the Regent Park Film Festival.
The Homemade Visible Project is hosting a symposium this Saturday, April 28 at the Toronto Media Arts Centre at 32 Lisgar Street. Re:collections brings Indigenous artists and artists of colour to share how their work engages, re-frames and re-defines the archive. They’re exploring questions like — How do we take the idea of an archive, and its difficult, racist, exclusionary history, and turn it around?
For more info you can check out Homemade Visible Symposium Facebook page.
Image: Homemade Visible. Used with permission
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