It’s true. There’s an Amateur Movie Day. See the AMD website for a list of events and screenings on March 13.
In 2003, the first Home Movie Day screenings seeded a growing awareness of the significance of the millions of small-gauge, amateur film recordings. For more than twenty years HMD has continued to grow, led by the Center for Home Movies with an informal worldwide network of the likeminded. In 2025, kindred spirits have announced Amateur Movie Day, March 13.
Thanks to Charles Tepperman’s multi-year grant project and his perennial advocacy via the Amateur Movie Database, a team of archivists and scholars from ten countries have been consulting/conspiring on initiatives that culminate with this March 13, 2025, celebration of Amateur Movie Day. (See the list below.)
Brian Meacham of Yale Film Archive has organized this screening of short amateur movies as part of the Cinemix Film Series at Yale Library. A long-time ally of the Orphan Film Symposium, Brian has there presented a variety newly-preserved but neglected works, including indy doc outtakes, Oscar-nominated shorts, and Yale student and alumni films. This March 13 program will include some of those, as well as distinctive amateur films showcased by other archives and filmmakers. Historian of amateur film Maria Vinogradova will introduce I Believe in Spring (1961) by first-time filmmaker Slava Tsukerman (later director of the 1982 cult movie Liquid Sky. I’ll be on-hand to screen a four-minute curio — Unidentified Theisen no. 1 — made in 1926 by unknown hands (preserved by the Library of Congress, from the AFI Collection, as received from the Academy of Motion Pictures, which acquired a set of rare-format films from collector Earl Theisen).
Dozens of amateur productions have screened at the Orphan Film Symposium. In 1999, Péter Forgács showed his documentary work with Hungarian amateur films of the 1930s, and Karen Ishizuka (Japanese American National Museum) brought the 16mm preservation debut of Topaz, Dave Tatsuno’s compilation of 8mm films he shot while incarcerated in Utah’s “Topaz War Relocation Center” during World War II. The second gathering saw the rising interest in preserving and studying amateur films and home movies: Karen Shopsowitz screened her documentary My Father’s Camera (National Film Board of Canada, 2000); Melinda Stone brought work from midcentury California Amateur Film Clubs; and Patricia Zimmermann led a roundtable on small-gauge cinemas. In later symposiums, we’ve seen well-crafted amateur works from Argentine, Switzerland, Mexico, Ukraine, Morocco, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Germany (East and West), Ecuador, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere.
In upcoming posts, I’ll write about other amateur films from the OFS past. For today, consider Scott Nixon’s The Augustas, a compilation the Amateur Cinema League member made from dozens of small-gauge films he shot during his travels to some twenty states during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. It’s now on the National Film Registry and Nixon’s collection of 800+ films is housed at USC MIRC. See Heidi Rae Cooley’s essay for the Center for Home Movies, as well as her award-winning book Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era.
18 minutes. No audio. Preserved with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
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Participating organizations include: University of Calgary, Chicago Film Archives, Lichtspiel/Kinemathek Bern, Northeast Historic Film, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, University of Georgia Brown Media Archives, University of Toronto, Music Box Theatre, University of Gothenburg, Filmtheater Hilversum, Palm Springs Public Library, University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections, George Washington University, Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, Yale University, Università degli Studi di Udine, Diazinteregio, and Yale University Library.
Participants include: Charles Tepperman, Louis Pelletier, Nancy Watrous, Olivia Babler, David Weiss, Benoît Carpentier, Brigitte Paulowitz, Brian Meacham, Stefanie Zingl, Margaret A Compton, Andy Uhrich, Andrew Watts, Eliane Antonia Maurer, Louisa Trott, Tanya Goldman, Maria Vinogradova, Melissa Dollman, Devin Orgeron, Enrique Fibla Gutierrez, Andrea Mariani, Mario Alves, Tim van der Heijden, Christina Stewart, Rafael de Luna Freire, et al.!
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