Film Restoration

Two film events will highlight HFPA restoration efforts. Continuing its mission to restore and preserve film heritage, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gives major contributions and grants to print and digital restoration projects and holds an annual Film Restoration Summit.

* An occasional series on films restored with the support of the HFPA. Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Paths of Glory, which was declared 'culturally, historically and aesthetically significant' by the Library of Congress in 1992, was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

An entertaining, surprising and instructive voyage through the silent era of film was one of the highlights of the two days of celebration of classic and restored that took place on February 15th at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. The first event of the second annual HFPA Restoration Summit was titled Serge Bromberg Presents: Treasures of the Silent Era, and filled the historic theatre with enthusiastic fans of the early days of Cinema.

The Hollywood Foreign Press association was front and center as The Noir Film Festival kicked off its 18th edition at the splendid Castro 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. It was the seventh year in a row that the HFPA has supported the restoration of another almost lost noir film, re-premiering it on the Festival's opening night.

.

.

.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, one of the world’s oldest, is celebrating its 54th iteration this year, and one of the highlights of this year’s edition was the screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory in the festival’s Out of the Past section. This film is one of the 92 films restored with HFPA funding in collaboration with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation.

Cinema Ritrovato is, with the Festival Lumière in Lyon, the world’s premiere film festival devoted to classic, rare and restored films and it is not hyperbole to say that it is a magical event. For nine days the ancient city of Bologna turns into the world capital of classic movies and a cinephile’s dream, with dozens of daily screenings, talks, symposia, and master classes.

The first Film Restoration Summit convened by the HFPA was held on March 9  at the historic Theater at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The building erected by United Artists founders Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks and specifically its flagship theater, with its ornate a baroque and Hollywood Spanish revival decorations, could not have been more appropriate for a discussion about the crisis facing film heritage around the world.