Home Movie Day 2022
Many people have some form of family home movies stashed away in their entertainment center or in a box in a closet or attic. Milwaukee Home Movie Day is a chance to dust off those old VHS tapes, Super 8 or 16mm film reels, or other formats, get them repaired and preserved, and show them off.
Home Movie Day has been around for 20 years, and is an international event hosted around the world, according to Shiraz Bhathena, a digital archivist in the UWM libraries and one of the local event organizers. It’s a day where people can bring their home media to be inspected and repaired by volunteers.
“Then the main part after that is it’s shown for everyone who attends, we give the patron a microphone and they can talk about it for 5 minutes or so to tell us what we’re seeing,” Bhathena explains.
In between screenings, the Home Movie Day volunteers talk about tips to properly preserve and archive your media collection. There’s raffles and a Home Movie Bingo attendees can play, where the game squares are filled with people and objects you might see in a home movie, like “Christmas Tree” or “Bride.”
“There’s a great history in home movies that can’t be captured in other formats,” Bhatena says on why he feels the event is important. “They preserve the history of someone’s family, it preserves genealogy. There’s something wonderful about the moving image format, it’s capturing history in real time both in image and sound form.”
Bhathena points out that Home Movie Day “isn’t a university event, it’s a community event. It’s a great way for everybody to come together and celebrate the history, specifically of our region.”
Milwaukee Home Movie Day is Saturday, October 15 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and takes place at UWM’s Mitchell Hall (3203 N. Downer Ave.) Room B91.
