The Wexner Center for the Arts will host its 10th rendition of the Cinema Revival Festival beginning Wednesday. Credit: Katie Good | Lantern File Photo
Films once thought to be gone forever are now returning to the big screen at Ohio State.
The Cinema Revival Festival, annually hosted by the Wexner Center for the Arts, celebrates and screens films from around the world that have been historically inaccessible due to damages to the physical film, a lack of adequate restorative technology and/or ever-shifting ownership of the film rights, the center’s head of film and video Dave Filipi said. He said this year’s festival in particular will showcase films from award-winning filmmakers like Charles Burnett and Nancy Savoca.
Savoca said the festival exposes larger issues within the film industry, specifically relating to a lack of information about how creators can retain access to their art.
“We know very little about the legality of our business,” Savoca said. “When I was in film school, you basically were taught how to make films. But once you get past that also just understanding what a contract looks like, what you’re agreeing to do, signing up with a distributor, and then that becomes its own contract and you will give them rights to the film.”
This lack of knowledge means filmmakers frequently lose track of their film(s) because the art’s rights will be exchanged between various companies as contracts expire, Savoca said. Furthermore, as a film’s rights are transferred from one company to another, the original creative team is uninformed as to where their art is being shown — if at all — she said.
“And of course, there were hundreds and tens of thousands of people that are affected by it,” Savoca said. “But we don’t all get a phone call. Whenever something changes hands, it should be in our contracts that the filmmaker should be notified.”
Filipi, who has been organizing the festival since 2015, said while the event itself is celebrating only its 10th iteration, the center has spotlit similar previously inaccessible films even prior to the festival’s inception in 2014.
“For years we have done programs kind of spotlighting film restoration and film preservation,” said Filipi. “About 10 years ago, we decided to make it a festival instead of doing the events scattered throughout the year. Let’s do a concentrated weekend. And when we started doing the festival, I’d say one of the main reasons that we did it was when digital technology was really becoming a powerful tool in film restoration.”
Beyond highlighting never-before-seen films, Filipi said the festival engages with film restoration, which involves editing films to premiere quality before screening. He said the process was not always feasible for this kind of event due to limited technological tools.
“Before digital, you would have to go back and you’d have to find whatever the best film surviving film elements were,” Filipi said. “There was a ceiling to how much restoration work that you could do on the film.”
Now, however, Filipi said readily available digital restoration technology has made the broader film revival process more easily accessible.
“All of a sudden when digital came along, it allowed archivists and people doing restoration work to scan the actual physical film print frame by frame cleaning scratches, improving sound and restoring color,” Filipi said.
Tim Lanza, who previously worked for the Columbus-based Cohen Media Group and contributed restored films to previous iterations of the Cinema Revival Festival, was appointed in July 2023 to the Ohio State University Libraries’ audiovisual preservation and digitization lead. Though he no longer directly participates in the event, Lanza said he encourages everyone to attend the festival because it rivals renowned film festivals from around the world.
“That’s why I point out that the MoMA in New York, UCLA, La Bologna and the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris each do a festival every year,” Lanza said. “But the Wexner Center is right up there, and here we are in Columbus.”
In recent years, the festival has collaborated with Milestone Films, a company co-founded and operated by husband-and-wife duo Dennis Doros and Amy Heller. The pair, who are also members of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Association of Moving Archivists — of which Doros is the president — said they have restored several of the films that will be screened for the festival.
“We are dedicated to rediscovering and helping restore films that are no longer available, not available now, and with a special focus on films that challenge the canon films by women, African American, queer and other filmmakers outside the mainstream,” Heller said. “We also hope to help filmmakers now be proactive, so that their films will be available in the future and also to just sort of alert the public and the industry to this problem.”
Doros said the festival’s impressive lineup — which features filmmakers like Savoca as well as film studies experts like Aboubakar Sanogo — is enough to make the event a worthwhile experience for all.
“Nancy Savoca and Charles Burnett are the best of the last 30 years,” Doros said. “Aboubakar is one of the great African cinema scholars. To be able to sit with them and have coffee or talk with them or hear what they have to say is an incredible opportunity.”
Beyond benefiting the festival’s attendees, Savoca said it is extremely fulfilling as a filmmaker to see one of her films, titled “Household Saints,” be restored and premiered.
“It’s beyond my wildest dreams,” Savoca said. “I never would have thought it happened, never would have imagined this.”
The Cinema Revival Festival will begin tomorrow and run until Monday. More information about the film selection and tickets can be found on the Wexner Center for the Arts’ website.
