Home Made Visible: Partnering with a Film Festival to Preserve IBPOC Home Movies

From 2017 to 2019, the Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible project, in partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, highlighted the personal histories of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour (IBPOC) communities in the collective, public memory through an engagement with archival research, artistic creation, and public programming. The project’s goal consisted of celebrating the joy captured in home movies, preserving these histories, and exploring how archives have the power to shape who we become and how we relate to one another. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, HMV commissioned seven films made by IBPOC artists and organized a tour of 51 exhibitions, workshops, screenings, and installations across Canada. The project also coordinated the donation of nearly 300 home movie clips from 36 families to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections for preservation in perpetuity. This collection spans six decades documenting the everyday life of 25 IBPOC communities. It features weddings, picnics, holiday celebrations, cultural traditions, religious ceremonies, birthday parties, school performances, snowstorms, and trips around the world in a multitude of languages. This presentation will discuss the project’s challenges and successes, including lessons learned from developing new partnerships and collaborative approaches to acquisition and description.