NFPF News

60 Films to be Saved by the NFPF’s 2022 Grants

The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) will be preserved by the Yale Film Archive with NFPF support.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is proud to announce the winners of its 2022 federally funded grants. 28 institutions will use the awards to preserve 60 films, including the 1921 mystery-western Trailin’, starring Tom Mix, the first true cowboy movie star; lecture reels of Dian Fossey’s groundbreaking mountain gorilla research; and the short comedic feature The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), one of two films completed filmmaker/professor Kathleen Collins before her premature death from cancer.

“Losing Ground (1982), the second and final film by Kathleen Collins, was added to the National Film Registry in 2020,” notes Allyson Nadia Field, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, and a member of the … Read more

Three NFPF Films at the UCLA Festival of Preservation

The Bus (1965) by Haskell Wexler.

Taking place May 20–22, the UCLA Festival of Preservation showcases the variety of recent preservation work by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The 20th edition of the Festival includes 10 features, seven shorts and four television programs. Among those shorts are three titles preserved through recent NFPF grants, all screening on Saturday, May 21.

Hey, Mama (1967) is a cinéma vérité documentary about African American life in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, California. It was directed and edited by Vaughn Obern, a white UCLA film student who spent six months in the neighborhood. Aware of his own status as an outsider, Obern immersed viewers in the daily lives of Oakwood’s working-class community and demonstrated the conditions created by structural racism. The film won second prize in the documentary category of the Fourth Annual … Read more

Go “Below the Surface” at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival!

Below the Surface (1920).

After a two-year break the San Francisco Silent Film Festival roars back to life on May 5th. This 25th anniversary edition lasts until May 11 and is jam-packed with films. Among these treasures is Below the Surface (1920), preserved by the Festival through the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The premiere of the restoration occurs on Friday, May 6, at 2pm, and we hope you can make it.

Below the Surface was the follow-up to the notorious revenge melodrama Behind the Door (1919). It reunites producer Thomas Ince, director Irvin Willat, star Hobart Bosworth, and cinematographer J.O. Taylor (later to film King Kong). Both films have action aboard submarines and a macabre shipboard denouement. In Below the Surface Bosworth plays a diver in small-town Maine who’s assisted by his loyal son (Lloyd Hughes). Their relationship is … Read more

Treasures DVDs Available from the NFPF Website

We are happy to report that our Treasures from American Film Archives DVD sets can now be purchased from the NFPF's Shopify website.We are thrilled to directly distribute these acclaimed sets, which present long unseen American films with new musical accompaniment, onscreen program notes, and printed catalogs. Available are: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934; Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986; Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938; and Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive.

 All orders will be fulfilled by the NFPF. We look forward to making these examples of superb archival preservation work easily available to students, academics, cinephiles, and anyone interested in America’s film heritage. 

Register for a 2022 NFPF Grant by March 25th!

Friday, March 25th marks the registration deadline for the National Film Preservation Foundation’s federally funded grant program, made possible by the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016.

The NFPF offers two types of federal cash grants that support the preservation of historically and culturally significant American films. Completed applications will be due Friday, April 29th.

Basic Preservation Grants fund laboratory work to create preservation masters and access copies, and are open to nonprofit and public institutions in the United States that provide public access to their film collections. The awards range from $1,000 to $20,000.

Matching Grants help experienced institutions undertake larger-scale projects; applicants may request cash stipends of between $20,001 and $75,000 to fund laboratory work. They must “match” the NFPF … Read more