Search Calls

Nowhere is a country’s culture and history as immediately and authentically accessible as in its audio-visual heritage. More than any other medium, film captures the flavors and textures of the everyday realities of the past. Privately made small-gauge films are a particularly important source of a nation’s audio-visual identity.

In recent years, enormous amounts of private film materials, many of them possibly valuable, have been discarded by their owners due to a lack of playback options. This painful loss gave the FAA the idea to launch a project aimed at systematically saving and preserving this ephemeral kind of filmmaking, which had been unjustly neglected far too long. The small-gauge films submitted to the FAA in response to its search calls were digitized, and the analog originals were put into long-term storage at the FAA’s Laxenburg location. The original owners were given free digital copies of their materials in the form of DVDs.