Home Movie Day 2018 is Here

Your family members and friends may blanch at the idea of sitting through your home movies, but plenty of people do want to see them – so much so that the Center for Home Movies holds an annual event to facilitate and encourage the sharing of such records of everyday life.

This year, it takes place Saturday, 20 October. Events are being held around the world over this weekend, while other events take place throughout the year.

Home Movie Day 2018 is the sixteenth. Since 2003, the Center for Home Movies has helped film organizations around the world to hold home-movie screenings and events in theaters, libraries, restaurants, and homes as celebrations of amateur filmmaking. Its mission is “to transform the way people think about home movies by providing the means to discover, celebrate, and preserve them as cultural heritage.”

This year, at least 83 events are slated to take place, in at least 23 countries:

Albania, Argentina, Australia, AustriaBrazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, GermanyItaly, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay

Home Movie Day events are generally open screenings of home movies brought along by members of the public, but local hosts decide how their events are run. Also scheduled in various locations, this year, are workshops, presentations, and screenings of archival home movie collections.

The Center for Home Movies, based in Madison, Wisconsin, has over the years developed a variety of programs. This year, it launched its Home Movie Archives Database, a survey of home movies and amateur films in collections in the United States — in archives, libraries, and museums.

The goal of the project, and of the related Home Movie Registry, is to provide researchers and documentary filmmakers with ready access to home movies.

The Center has also released the Living Room Cinema DVD and a series of Home Grown Movies collections of material presented at Home Movie Day screenings. Increasingly, it is pursuing means of making accessible the home movie holdings of various archives and collections via its Home Movie Registry and Home Movie Archives Database projects.

The spirit of the annual celebration is well expressed by filmmaker John Waters: “There’s no such thing as a bad home movie. These mini-underground opuses are revealing, scary, joyous, always flawed, filled with accidental art, and shout out from attics and closets all over the world to be seen again. Home Movie Day is an orgy of self-discovery, a chance for family memories to suddenly become show business. If you’ve got one, whip it out and show it now.”

More information is online, or you can get in touch with the Center at info@centerforhomemovies.org.

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