The project of the Film Restoration Summer School - FIAF Summer School, which was initiated in 2007, is part of a wider training programme of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film  (FIAF), established in 1973. The main goal of the Summer School consists in having participants trained in film restoration and in the preservation of film heritage through the adoption and application of analogue and digital technologies. After the successful previous editions, FIAF, ACE and the MEDIA Plus Programme of the European Union combine their efforts with the Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata for the fourth time to organize the Film Restoration Summer School / FIAF Summer School 2010.

Target Group

As in 2007 and 2009, this year’s course is aimed at specialists and people who work in the film industry, such as archivists and staff working at FIAF archives. Priority will be given to people working for FIAF and ACE members. The training is conceived for an international target group, and will be taught by an international panel of the best experts from different countries. Classes will be in English. The course will be divided into different levels. Skill evaluation will determine a separation into different groups on the basis of personal CV and film archive experience.

Main Objectives

The project’s main objective is to teach and update participants on how to restore, reconstruct, and preserve a film using analogue and new digital technology, and how analogue systems and new digital technologies can actually coexist.

Participants will have the chance to experience everyday work in a highly specialized laboratory, including all departments and every step of the process, from beginning to end. The participants are expected to acquire specific skills: operating all digital and analogue equipment in an archive and a restoration laboratory; following a complete restoration process; performing all the main necessary operations needed to restore a film; evaluating the state of conservation of a film, deciding the best practice to restore, reconstruct, and preserve it as well as managing a budget for a restoration project.

The connection between learning about digital and analogue restoration and Il Cinema Ritrovato is a close one. It is important to put restoration into practice and to learn how to restore a film, while it is equally crucial to understand how films, restored by different archives, can be exhibited today.

Programme 2010

The Film Restoration Summer School / FIAF Summer School is structured along three main course steps:

• Theory Lessons on Film Restoration: distance learning: 18 May to 22 June (each Tuesday)
• Introduction to and attendance of Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival: Bologna, 26 June to 3 July
• Restoration practice: Bologna, 5 to 16 July

Application Process

Participants will be selected according to their CV, commitment, and motivation. All applications will be examined by a special commission composed of representatives of FIAF, ACE, and the Cineteca di Bologna. The commission will officially release the names of the 30 selected participants via email and the Film Restoration Summer School / FIAF Summer School 2010 website in April 2010.

Participation Fee: 2.000 Euros. The participation fee includes registration, festival pass, room for 21 days (from Saturday 26 to Saturday 17) and lunch for 16 days (from Sunday 27 to Friday 16 – all days except Saturday and Sunday out of the festival week).

Please note that the deadline for submitting the application has been prolonged to 23 April 2010!

pdf dowloads:
Summer School Programme 2010

Application form

CV template (in English) 

For further information please contact the Film Restoration Summer School/ FIAF Summer School coordinators:

Davide Pozzi
davide.pozzi(at)immagineritrovata.it
Phone: +39 051 552541
Fax: +39 051 521584

Elena Tammaccaro
elena.tammaccaro(at)immagineritrovata.it
Phone: +39 051 552541
Fax: +39 051 521584

Cineteca del Comune di Bologna
c/o L'Immagine Ritrovata
via Riva di Reno, 72
40123 – Bologna - Italia
http://www.immagineritrovata.it

Project duration: September 2008 - September 2011

Project co-ordination: Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF e. V.

Initiated by ACE and EDL Foundation, the EFG project aims at finding and implementing solutions for providing integrated access to the wealth of Europe’s cinematographic heritage. To date, digitised collections of moving images and cinema-related material are dispersed, lacking the possibility of domain-specific search and access across the various repositories, institutions and countries. Considerable challenges exist in several fields: The problem of lacking coherence in digitisation practice and metadata standards across the film archives and cinémathèques has to be tackled in order to provide for the basic technical and semantic preconditions for integrated access.

EFG specifically addresses the issues of IPR management and technical and semantic interoperability. Best practices and standards will be adapted and promoted  in each of these three fields. Also, an approach at providing basic multilingual features will be made.
With its 21 partners from 15 European countries, the network provides access to more than 700.000 digitised objects, including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents. 

EFG is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme.

http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu
EFG partner list

The MIDAS project aims at addressing effectively one of the bottlenecks blocking the full development of an efficient European distribution – for commercial and cultural purposes – of EU archival materials having historical and cultural value. This bottleneck, on which there is a vast consensus of a wide spectrum of stakeholders, consists in the complex, time consuming and costly process of locating archival materials across European collections, and identifying the copyright owners.

The project addresses this issue by establishing technical solutions apt to making possible the search and retrieval of archival materials held in a number of collections across Europe by centralising the process of search and retrieval, and by overcoming the language barriers. MIDAS is a pilot project in the MEDIA Plus programme of the European Commission and is carried out by 18 institutions dedicated to collecting and preserving film heritage in Europe – 16 of them ACE members. The Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF e.V. in Frankfurt is coordinating the project.

Project Duration: January 15, 2006 until January 15, 2009

http://www.midas-film.org/

Web portal filmarchives online

"filmarchives online. Finding Moving Images in European Collections" – www.filmarchives-online.eu - is the visible result of the MIDAS project. Since February 2007 it gives access to catalogue information of a growing number of archives. Via this multi-lingual web gateway film works can be searched for by content, filmographic data and physical characteristics. Detailed search results provide information on existence and location of the materials as well as contact details to facilitate access.

The data exports from all 18 partners have been ingested partly into the MIDAS system so far. By the end of 2008 all MIDAS partners' contribution will be accessible online. Updating routines have been established, so that the partners contributing metadata will be able to upload files on their own even after MIDAS has ended.

A co-operation has been initiated in 2006 with the digital short film distribution portal reelport (www.reelport.com). reelport delivers metadata to MIDAS. The Scottish Screen Archive, who will contribute to filmarchives online.eu in summer 2008 the latest, does not belong to the MIDAS consortium either, but chose to make parts of their stock available via filmarchives online. A further co-operation is currently being initiated with the German search portal for libraries, archives and museums (BAM-Portal). MIDAS will deliver metadata to this portal, which will widen the user base considerably.

Target audience

filmarchives online aims at user groups ranging from the area of scientific research to the professional media and film production domain. The database's content focuses on non-fiction material; i.e. documentary and educational film, newsreels, travelogues, comercial advertising, scientific, industrial, experimental, sports as well as animation films.

MIDAS II

On July 17, the proposal for the second year of MIDAS was submitted. It was approved by the European Commission. This meant EU funding for MIDAS until January 2008. The second project year officially started on January 15, 2007, with a total EU funding of 322.549 EUR. In addition to the five current partners, eleven new partners joined the consortium.

MIDAS III

In October 2007 the propasal for a third and final MIDAS year had been approved by MEDIA Plus. MIDAS III started January 15, 2008 and will run through January 15, 2009. The total EU funding for the third project year is 349.004 EUR. Two new partners joined the project in 2008.

Project partners:

MIDAS partner list

Project website: http://www.midas-film.org/

Web portal: http.//www.filmarchives-online.eu

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Former (CEN-Project / CEN/BT/TF 179)

Project duration: 2005 - 2008

In 2005, the European Commission mandated the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) with the development of a European metadata standard on cataloguing and indexing practices of cinematographic works.  The DIF is heading the project in cooperation with DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) and is providing the convenor. European film archives are participating in the project under the umbrella of CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation).

The Cinematographic Works Standards group (CEN.BT TC 372) is about to complete its task of establishing the second part of a two-part standard by the beginning of 2009. Following part 1:  Film Identification – Minimum set of metadata for cinematographic works), part 2 (Film Identification – Enhancing interoperability of data from disparate sources) will be a a comprehensive specification for the exchange of filmographic information among archives and other cultural heritage institutions.It shall provide an exhaustive definition of metadata occurring in the field of work as well as a data model and information on exchanging such information. It also contains a comprehensive and consistent terminology.
Part 1 of the standard will be published in March 2009.
The 4th Working Draft of part 2 will pass the 6 months enquiry period until late summer this year.

For more infomation please see http://www.filmstandards.org

The European Commission launches in cooperation with ACE European Cinema Heritage Week.
"Organised for the first time and running between 15 and 24 November 2002, European Cinema Heritage Week will consist of a programme of major European cinema films in cinemas and film libraries, with special showings organised, particularly for schools. The renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has agreed to be sponsor for the Week, which will have a dual aim: to raise the awareness of Europeans, and particularly young people, of the great wealth of European cinema cultures, with the hope of encouraging them to go and see more non-national European films, but also to promote discussion of the visual image and approaches to education in the visual image."

Here you can find out who is participating in CINEDAYS:

Provisional list of partners and events
Provisional list of Europa Cinemas and their programmes
Participating ACE Archives

Project Duration: 2002 - 2004

1. The Context: Euopean Film Heritage and Digital Technologies: a need for Standards
There is little doubt that Film Heritage is an important part of the European history, and of its cultural identity. This heritage represents a pivotal asset for contemporary cultural industry, and archival films provide content for broadcasters and cable-TVs, for a growing DVD market, for broadband applications and multimedia products, and also for contemporary productions.
Today, modern Digital techniques are opening new perspectives in the domain of conserving, restoring, and accessing the enormous film collections held by public and private institutions all over Europe. In order to fully develop the possibilities opened up by these new techniques, and in order to fully exploit these new ways of addressing the issue of the preservation of the Film Heritage for cultural or commercial purposes, a strong need of Standards and Recommended Practices is generally felt. 

2. The Project: Different points of view, a common roundtable

To a great extent, using Digital techniques means to open up possibilities of unprecedented synergies among different areas of applications and use of the Film Heritage. The European Film Archives have acknowledged this basic truth, and are fully aware that the issues involved in Digitisation must be dealt with in a wider perspective, representing the different points of view of the existing stakeholders.
Up to now, a common approach on the issue of Digitisation and Archival Films is lacking. Digital techniques are studied and experimented by Film Archives, TV channels, IT companies, multimedia providers in a parallel and separate (although vastly overlapping) way. Synergies, exchange of experiences, process economies were therefore precluded, as well as any understanding of any different point of view.

For the very first time in Europe, the Project FIRST has set up a table where Digital and Film Heritage is an issue discussed as a whole.
In facts, FIRST has the aim of studying the "state of the Art", of proposing new fields of research, to sketch new economical scenarios, to evaluate existing techniques, to issue recommendations, to propose widely accepted Standards and Best Practices. In other words, FIRST is a chance to promote and create a "mature" scenario for the application of Digital techniques to Film Heritage.

Click here for more information

Project Duration: 1993 - 1998

The Joint European Filmography (JEF) is a database project which was initiated by LUMIERE in 1992. The idea is simple: To consolidate all sources of European records into a single database and produce and market in book and CD-Rom form a Joint Filmography of all European Film production from the earliest times to the present.

Project Duration: 1997 -2004

The European training network for the promotion of Cinema Heritage, ARCHIMEDIA, has been the initiative of the Cinémathèque Royale Brussels and the Université‚ Paris III / Sorbonne Nouvelle and was established in 1997 with the support of MEDIA II. The aim of the ARCHIMEDIA project was to establish formally on a European level an active network of co-operation between archives and universities, developing together a specific training programme which both meets their needs and combines their individual strengths.

This network of film archives, universities and audiovisual laboratories offered two programmes: an introductory training course for graduates of universities and a series of workshops, colloquia and seminars designed exclusively for professionals from archives and the audiovisual industries.

http://www.ledoux.be/archimedia/presentation_en.htm

In 1997 this project was financed by the Raphael programme (1997-1999) with 32.000 ecu.  During 1997 Vittorio Martinelli and Gian Luca Farinelly have examined unidentified material in the Bundesarchiv Berlin, the Cineteca Italiana Milano and the Cinemathèque Suisse Lausanne. The lists of identified films have been communicated to all European film archives. A workshop was organised during the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato 1997 in Bologna, led by professor Brunetta from the University of Padova, about the hisitory of forgetting and rediscovering the cinema heritage. In the financial report that was approved by the GA in Pordenone a reservation of 10.000 was made for the Search for Lost Films 1998, in case no European subsidy would be granted. Since this now is the situation, a short term planning has been made based on this budget.

• Kaleidoscope 1996 project: All the colours of the World. Colours in early mass media 1900-1930.
  This project has resulted in a colloquium during the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato 1997 in Bologna and a book on the subject in Italian and English, published by Grafis with the support of the Istituto per i beni culturali della Regione Emilia-Romagna. 
• Film Archives On Line (FAOL)
  This three-year project aims to create educational instruments for people working in film archives or laboratories specialised in restoration. The idea is to provide this training, using texts as well as stills and moving images, from a distance through multimedia means.

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