Filmoteca revives Andalucian Super-8 home movies

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHtNn-tcCns[/embed]   A new project by La Filmoteca Española aims to collect and digitalise home movies made by Andalucians in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea behind Proyecto Mi Vida is to create a digital archive of family films, showing regional travel, customs and fiestas to form part of a collective memory - an Andalucian visual heritage. La Filmoteca Española is an official institution of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, based in Cordoba, whose objective is to restore, investigate and conserve the film heritage of Spain and its diffusion. You can see children - who would now be in their 40s and 50s, with their own offspring - jumping in the waves on Andalucian beaches, or playing with the dog in their garden. The family's first-ever plane journey, filmed as they arrive at Barcelona airport. An outing through villages in the interior of one of Andalucia's provinces - the people, the food; the cousins who came along for the summer holiday…. Family memories which many recorded on Super-8, the most popular format of cine film all those decades ago, and which have been left for years in a forgotten corner of the house.

So Filmoteca is asking Andalucians to search their attics, wardrobes, storerooms, garages (and presumably their parents', too); find those cardboard boxes hidden under piles of unwanted clothes and books, where family photo albums are stacked, and unearth the recordings which are also hidden away in a dark, dusty spot. Send them to Filmoteca, and their technicians will convert them into a digital format which can be used in today's devices.

"They are films made by normal citizens recording their lives", explained Filmoteca director, Pablo García Casado in an interview with El Diario. "They are an important film heritage which tells us about Andalucian life in the 1960s and 1970s."

The first films have now been converted in this historic fly-on-the-wall project. Each week, La Filmoteca will upload to its YouTube channel short fragments of the films. You can see family beach holidays at Salobreña (Granada), a visit to the wineries in Montilla (Córdoba), family parties, the night of the Reyes Magos (Three Kings, 5 January) at home, and games in the swimming pool. Scenes of daily life - people riding a donkey - a common form of transport back then.

"Anyone who has a Super-8 reel at home can send it to us or email us at [email protected], so that these memories don't get lost," says García Casado.

In the film clips you can see in the video above, it is fascinating to note how Andalucia's towns and cities, the region's coastline and beaches, countryside and roads, looked in those bygone days. It's also fun to see everything from the cars to clothes and hairstyles of the period. These films are equally entertaining for the next generation of children, to see how their parents' generation spent their summer vacations, as they are for those who experienced them.

Blog published on 23 September 2016