Home Movie Day in Zhovkva
22.11.2026, 15:00
"Prosvita" People's House, L'vivs'ka St., 37, Zhovkva
We invite guests and residents of Zhovkva to a film screening featuring a selection of films from the Urban Media Archive’s collections in celebration of International Home Movie Day.
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 joint screening will include "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.
Home Movie Day
The Center for Urban History has been hosting Home Movie Days regularly since 2016. For us, it’s an opportunity to showcase the digitized collections of the Urban Media Archive and watch them together with the filmmakers and participants. It’s also an effort to highlight the importance of preserving family archives, even if they’re stored on outdated media.
Urban Media Archive
Urban Media Archive is a community-based archiving project focused on audiovisual materials that document personal histories, everyday life, work, leisure, and changes in the urban environment of Central and Eastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The archive works with private, family, and institutional collections, paying special attention to the preservation of endangered and orphaned collections. We digitize photographs, negatives, slides, photo albums, amateur films on 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm film, as well as VHS videotapes, to preserve these materials
Home Movie Day is presented as part of the public program "From Place to Place: Stories from Scattered Archives" of the "REHERIT 2.0: Common Responsibility for Shared Heritage" project.
The "REHERIT 2.0" project is implemented by the Center for Urban History and the "Regional Development" Center of the PPV Economic Development Agency with financial support from the European Union.
This publication was created with the financial support of the European Union. The content is the sole responsibility of the partners of the “REHERIT 2.0” project and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
