Alain Daumas

Maria Daumas

Thierry Patrac

Bernard Landauer

Coral Ortiz

Offers audiences a unique window into a bygone era when a thrilling new invention, the motion picture camera, first captures a nation on film.

Why are we still able, today, to view images that were captured over 125 years ago? As we enter the digital age, audiovisual heritage seems to be a sure and obvious fact. However, much of cinema and our filmed history has been lost forever. Archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what audiovisual preservation is and why it is necessary. The documentary is a tribute to all these professionals and their important work.

Through the Fondren Fellows program, the Rice Media Center Archive Project has spent the past few months sifting through material stored at the now-defunct Rice Media Center. The team has identified several films as especially notable and will be presenting them in conjunction with documentary footage the team shot of people involved with the films. From lectures featuring Roberto Rossellini and Werner Herzog to films from former Rice students and faculty, the film presentation will tell the narrative of the Rice Media Center through the films and filmmakers that passed through its corridors.

Negev Desert, Israel, 1987. Bashir Abu Rabi'a works as a pyrotechnics and special effects assistant on the film Rambo III, starring Sylvester Stallone, a shoot that will have far-reaching consequences for the local Bedouin population.

Using archival iPhone footage of both the places my father and I call home and our childhood photos, this work collages time and space, traveling from 1975 to 2022 and from Havana, Cuba to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in between. His home is my home, and my home is his.

The first half century of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation from its beginnings under Hungarian immigrant William Fox to it emergence as a major studio.