A team of film experts and archivists from the United States under the direction of Dan Streible traveled to Buenos Aires in May 2009 to help the Museo del Cine preserve its orphan films.  An under-funded city institution, the Museo holds a large and important collection of rare motion pictures, many in urgent need of preservation.

The all-volunteer team of 14 includes preservationists from the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard, the University of Chicago, BB Optics film lab, as well as NYU faculty and students.  Co-organizers of the project are NYU alumnae Paula Félix-Didier (MIAP ’06), director of the Museo del Cine, and Natalia Fidelholtz (MIAP ’06).

The Museo del Cine collection is vast and comprises more than 65,000 reels of 16mm film alone.  The films come from all over the Americas and Europe, produced as early as 1910 and as late as the 1990s. In 2008, Félix-Didier made international headlines when she and Fernando Peña uncovered a silent-era masterpiece long presumed lost—the director’s cut of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Germany, 1927). Other “lost” films from early Hollywood and elsewhere are being found as the collection gets inspected.

“We’re on an archivists-without-borders mission and this group is a kind of dream team for a film archive,” said Streible. The team will spend two weeks (May 17-30) in Buenos Aires and devote its time to the meticulous work of archiving. Films will be inventoried, inspected, repaired, identified, catalogued, and rehoused, with the most valuable finds prepared for laboratory preservation. All work will be done in collaboration with the museum’s staff, who will also receive training with supplies and equipment they have previously lacked.

The Buenos Aires project is part of NYU’s Audio-Visual Preservation Exchange (APEX), which was established by Mona Jimenez, associate director of MIAP, in 2008 to conduct a similar outreach in Accra, Ghana.