Following the keynote address, “Home Movie Day: Personal Archives Lost and Found” by SSHMP director Jacqueline Stewart, at 11am.

Long ignored in both film histories and social studies, home movies capture a range of details about everyday life that elude textual evidence as well as still photographs. As records created by everyday people, home movies are ripe for interpreting nuances of cultural expression, from fashion to foodways to the ways people walk down the street. Home movies also provide unique evidence of the ways in which people represent themselves on camera, precursors to the “selfies” of today.

Join the South Side Home Movie Project for an introduction to this unique initiative to collect, preserve, digitize and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Featuring film clips from the 1920s-1980s, this session invites attendees to imagine new ways of activating and preserving community knowledge through home movies. Families who have donated their films to the SSHMP will be on hand to narrate their films and share the experience of preserving their home movies and seeing them on screen for the first time in decades.