Lila Foster is a curator, researcher and film preservationist. Articulating historical research and audiovisual preservation, her work focuses on the history of amateur production and home movies in Brazil. She is currently the Director of Institutional Relations of the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA).
Home Movies, amateur films and film archives: New Paths in films history and film preservation
In 2007, I worked as a cataloguer at the Cinemateca Brasileira, Brazil's largest film archive. A major part of the job was analyzing materials that had recently been donated to the archive and it was not uncommon to run into large collections of 16mm films, still kept in Kodak and Ansco film boxes, complete with nicely handwritten notes displaying what they contained.
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In 1974, Sérgio Ricardo’s A Noite do Espantalho, shot entirely in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, was shown at the New York Film Festival. It was not until forty five years later, when Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau came to the New York Film Festival in 2019, that Ricardo returned to New York City, this time through song.
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This past September, the staff of Limite had the opportunity to conduct an interview with the Workers of the Cinemateca Brasileira (Trabalhadores da Cinemateca Brasileira) , the collective representing the archivists and staff of Brazil’s largest film archive, who have been fighting for nearly an entire year for the survival of this vital institution.
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The following interview took place with archivist Hernani Heffner on July 4th, 2020. Heffner has been working at Rio de Janeiro’s historic Cinemateca do MAM since 1996 and is one of Brazil’s most important film archivists.
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