Film is Dead. Long Live Film!

Peter Flynn (Dir), 102 minutes, USA, Western New York Premiere

An exploration of the vanishing world of private film collecting — an obsessive, secretive, often illicit world of basement film vaults, piled -high with forgotten reels, inhabited by passionate cinephiles 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 long-lost 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.