The San Francisco Film Preserve is launching Re:Vision, a new festival dedicated to restored and rediscovered cinema, with films from 18 countries due to screen at the Roxie Theater from 24 to 27 September.
The inaugural event will bring together work spanning 11 decades of film history, with programmes covering different genres, formats and styles. Each of the 14 programmes will pair a feature with at least one short film, alongside introductions and special guests.
The festival opens on Thursday with My Name Ain’t Suzie, Angie Chen’s 1985 Hong Kong drama about identity and the legacy of colonial storytelling. The film has been restored from original 35mm materials and will be shown with English subtitles.
It will be accompanied by May Fung’s 1989 short She Said Why Me and Len Lye’s animated film Rainbow Dance. The Lye restoration was undertaken by the San Francisco Film Preserve using multispectral scanning, in collaboration with the Len Lye Foundation and New Zealand’s Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision archive.
Other screenings include the Czech drama Valley of the Bees, Guinean film Dakan, the Irish horror title The Outcasts and the Thai action film I Am With a Monk. The programme also features films from Venezuela, Sudan, Denmark and the United States.
The festival will conclude with the 1944 Danish noir Melody of Murder. Several of the films have not been shown on Bay Area screens for at least five years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Kathy Rose O’Regan, executive director of the San Francisco Film Preserve, said the event was intended to draw attention to the archives and archivists working to protect moving-image history.
The organisation says its work includes scanning original film elements at high resolution, digitally repairing damaged frames and creating new preservation materials. Its restored films are held in the San Francisco Film Preserve collection at the Library of Congress.
Re:Vision—Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery runs at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco from Thursday 24 September to Sunday 27 September.
