As a result of the SAFE – Sustainability of Italian Film Heritage project (2022-2025), this poster will provide insights into the outputs collected from a national survey of practices and strategies for non-theatrical film heritage in Italy. The SAFE project analyzed the current state of film archiving through three research axes: storage infrastructures, digital preservation practices, and stewardship strategies.
Submitted in early spring 2025, this survey investigates several crucial topics related to sustainable film archiving practices, such as long-term analog and digital storage, labor organization, funding, and environmental accountability. The expected results of this research are twofold: first, it allows a clear and in-depth overview of the current state of preservation of non-theatrical film heritage, and second, it provides a timeline for archival organizations to anticipate the foreseeable future of preservation practices. In the last decades, alongside the more established cineteche and film archives, the field of Italian film heritage has acknowledged the rapid development and emergence of organizations dedicated to non-theatrical heritage (including home movies, political films, and industrial or scientific audiovisual production).
In this presentation, we will make available the main outputs of the quantitative and qualitative research that involved several key film heritage organizations, completed by field interviews, through a still poster including aggregated data visualization of the study. We also plan to provide an interactive data restitution of the survey results using tablets allowing cross-checked research to have a better understanding of the current state of sustainability of Italian film heritage.
