The Alice Cinema on the Yale University campus hosted an ideal of an Amateur Movie Day event. Afterward we realized Connecticut is also apt place to celebrate Amateur Movie Day. Its residents have included Amateur Cinema League founder Hiram Percy Maxim (Hartford), ACL members and award recipients Cynthia and S. W. Childs (Norfolk), and the venerated Robbins Barstow (Wethersfield), who made movies from 1936 until his passing in 2010.* Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive) put it all together, programming eight films from four sources. Although the university was on spring break, an attentive audience filled nearly two thirds of
Category: amateur films
Amateur Movie Days
Happy Amateur Movie Day! The 2024 Orphan Film Symposium featured more amateur films than any previous gathering. Filmmaker and researcher Libertad Gills made this trailer for the occasion, introducing us to this exemplar of amateur film in Guayaquil. The symposium showcased amateur films in multiple modes. In addition to quintessential home movies of family life, we also watched movies made to document professional work: archaeology in Mexico and Mauritania; ballet in Europe and the USSR; medical procedures; boat building; computer experiments; textile manufacture. Amateur films used as therapy for at-risk youth in midcentury France, and as labor activism in Uruguay.
Amateur Movie Day is March 13.
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