Film is Dead. Long Live Film!

An old, deteriorated film strip with a series of black and white images. The film strip has visible damage and rust, indicating age and decay. The images on the film appear to be from an early 20th-century performance or play, featuring individuals in per

Film is Dead. Long Live Film! explores the vanishing world of private film collecting—an obsessive, secretive, often illicit world of basement film vaults, piled-high with forgotten reels, and inhabited by passionate cineastes devoted to the rescue and preservation of photochemical film.

Condemned as pirates and hounded by the FBI, film collectors have long lurked in the shadows. Yet their efforts have resulted in the survival of countless films that would otherwise have been lost to history. Archives and studios now look to private hands for missing titles and many collectors have begun restoring and releasing films themselves. As analog film fades from memory, the basement-dwellers and bootleggers of old are finally being given their due.

Visually stunning, dramatically complex, and emotionally rich, Film is Dead. Long Live Film! is a lively and loving tribute to the private film collector, a celebration of the fetishistic subculture of pre-video cinephilia, and a timely reminder of the glories of analog film.

Film is Dead. Long Live Film! screens as part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of Coldeye Films and Bayview Entertainment.