Home Movie Day 2026

We invite you to a film screening in celebration of International Home Movie Day, so that—together with the filmmakers and participants in the films from the Urban Media Archive's collections—we can recall how these films were made and how we used to watch them with family and friends.

Every year, Home Movie Day brings together institutions that preserve and make public private and amateur film archives. The Urban Media Archive continuously collects and digitizes films on 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm film reels free of charge. Digital copies bring back to life memories of family and private daily life that might otherwise remain inaccessible to their owners without the necessary viewing equipment. At the same time, digitization helps preserve the film reels themselves, which are damaged with every viewing and gradually deteriorate even during long-term storage.

Home and amateur films capture daily life and living spaces, leisure activities, workplaces, and everyday routines. In these films, the documentation of important private events is often combined with creative projects, in which the filmmakers enlisted the help of family members, friends, and colleagues. Today, these films serve as a testament to everyday life and the visual culture of the 1960s–1990s.

This year's program of joint screenings from home film archives includes "peeking in" on colleagues at the police station from Mykhailo Banakh's collection, family walks near greenhouses from Katarzyna Loza's collection, vacationing in the mountains from Malgorzata Ruszela's collection, mushroom picking in Cherkasy on found footage from Oleksandr Makhanets's collection, a comedic sketch about back-to-school preparations from Markiyan Hrab's collection, as well as an environmental film by the "Horyn" folk film studio.

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Images

Top: Still frame from the 8 mm film / Cherkasy / 1980s / Oleksandr Makhanets' collection