Personal stories from the past, shots from everyday life of ordinary people, or holiday celebrations, vacations and even trips abroad. The "Kinoclub Super 8" project makes us look at the 20th century through the prism of home documentary cinema. The amateur films have preserved fragments of life in Bulgaria from the 1930s to the end of the 1980s. A group of enthusiasts collects the old video films, restores and digitizes them. Then they upload them to their YouTube channel and that is how these shots from the recent history of Bulgaria become part of the world's digital space and collective memory.

Director Neda Milanova is a co-founder of the project together with 3 other people who are involved in cinema or photography and are passionate about old amateur films. That is how the idea to create an archive of film rolls in 8 and 16 mm format, as well as of Super 8 films, emerged.

"Our goal is to collect them in one place, as we are sure that they are part of our cultural heritage and at the moment there is no other archive with similar content. We digitize the footage in order to reach the people,” Neda Milanova tells Radio Bulgaria and adds: “Our oldest videos are from 1932. There are only three of them and were filmed outside Sofia. The shots are from Hisarya and Bansko. They show village life, grape harvest, walks by the river. It's very interesting to see how people were dressed back then, how they lived..."

The club’s Super 8 collection now includes over 200 archive films provided by donors. The footage includes a trip to a village, views of the Bulgarian Black Sea before it was taken over by concrete, celebration of May 9 in Sofia, a young woman getting her hair cut in the bathroom, a man mocking communist leader Todor Zhivkov at the New Year's table... What do these silent, flickering moving pictures reveal of an era that is increasingly fading in our memories?

See a video with amateur footage of the life of teenagers in Bulgaria in the 70s:

It turns out that in addition to documentary films, the archive of "Kinoclub Super 8" also includes amateur feature films shot by enthusiasts who put all their creativity and sincerity into the homemade work:

"The most interesting for me personally are these attempts at experimental cinema. For example, teenagers trying to shoot their own feature film, making their own captions and indicating the name of the director and the screenwriter. There is great sincerity in them," Neda Milanova says.

She admits that she feels like a detective when a new film comes into her hands because she never knows what she might stumble upon. Together with her colleagues, they organize public screenings of the home videos with the idea of introducing people to the untold personal stories of the past. The club is part of the international organization Inedits, which unites creators in their effort to preserve and distribute archival amateur cinema in Europe.

See also:

• Bulgaria’s visual memory of the 20th century on a new platform

English version: Al. Markov

Photos: Kinoclub Super 8