Super 8mm Festival

The Super 8 Movement and Festival in Szeged, Hungary

.... The evolution of film culture has reached a stage which can be characterized by the renaissance of old techniques. Professional filmmakers never gave up using simple technologies, and low-budget systems sometimes prove to be a more suitable device of artistic expression.

The techniques and technologies Super 8 filmmaking uses make it a special category within filmmaking. It is little known today that the basis of home filmmaking was Super 8. Super 8 culture has spread through Western Europe in the past decades, several film clubs and festivals are a proof of its popularity.

Both in Hungary and abroad, mainly film workshops in university clubs and smaller film festivals popularize Super 8 film culture. Luckily, owing to the post-modern nature of modern visual culture, lovers of film are open to everything, and the base of Super 8 is becoming wider.

Over the last 8 years Szeged has become the capital of Super 8 film culture in Hungary. The Szeged Super 8 group has been collecting films in Hungary since 2000. Today films are arriving even from abroad to be saved and archived. More than 300 hours of film material, from 1941 to 2011; from cartoons through to documentary are to be digitalized and categorized.

Future plans include setting up an open archive on the Internet in which film collections will be available in different categories. It will be a filmmaker’s catalogue (of ads, of art films, etc.) from which interested parties will have the opportunity to apply for a license to use the films or part of them. This virtual archive will also be a kind of Noah’s ark for memories recorded on 8mm wide celluloid. In order to preserve such memories, it is the films which must be rescued. And the guys with this mission are the Memory Rescue Team.

Postal address: Péter Rózsa, 6721 Szeged, Jakab Lajos u.16., Hungary

super8mmfest@gmail.com

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