Manifesto

On what we restore

We do not restore films because they are forgotten. Forgetting is not a moral failure. We restore films because the conditions that produced them — censorship, resource scarcity, political surveillance, cultural isolation — are conditions that need to be understood, not because they are exceptional but because they are recurring.

Central and Eastern European cinema from 1945 to 1989 produced some of the most formally radical work of the twentieth century. This is not coincidence. The cinema of constraint invents form because form is the only field in which constraint cannot follow you. A filmmaker who cannot say a thing directly will find a way to say it obliquely, and the oblique sometimes turns out to be the more powerful mode.

We restore these films because they have things to say that have not yet been heard. Not because they are masterpieces (some are, some are not) but because the conditions of their production are not yet past.

On how we choose

We do not restore the canonical. The canonical restores itself. We look for films that are formally interesting and historically significant but that have fallen through the gaps of national cultural funding and international distribution circuits.

This means we often work with films that are formally difficult, politically awkward to their country of origin, or simply too strange to have attracted the kind of institutional attention that leads to prior restoration.

We do not have a formula. We have a conversation between Lena and Tomasz that has been running since 2009, that takes in archive screenings and private collections and the reports of collaborating historians, and that produces a list of candidates each year. The list is always longer than the budget. The budget constrains but does not determine the selection.

On restoration ethics

We restore to what the film was, not to what we would have it be. This sounds obvious. It is not always obvious in practice. A film shot on 16mm with hand-held camera and available light has a specific visual texture. That texture is part of its meaning. A restoration that removes the grain, sharpens the edges, and corrects the colour to contemporary standards is not restoring the film. It is restoring the subject matter while destroying the form.

We work from original camera negatives where they survive. Where only prints survive, we document the condition and provenance of the print and make the restoration parameters transparent. Our restoration reports are published with each film and are part of the work.

We do not reconstruct missing footage. We document its absence.

On screening

A film is not finished when it is restored. It is finished when it is seen, in a room, with other people, in the dark. This is why we screen.

The screening is not promotional material for the restoration. The restoration is the condition that makes the screening possible. The screening is the point.

We invite historians and critics and surviving collaborators not to add authority to the event but to keep the conversation open. A film made in 1969 Czechoslovakia three months before the Soviet invasion is not a historical document first. It is a film first. The history is context. The film is the thing.

On what we do not do

We do not curate in the sense of imposing a narrative on the films we restore. We are not arguing that Eastern European cinema was better than Western European cinema, or that constraint produces better art, or that the films we restore are representative of anything beyond themselves.

We do not claim expertise in the countries and cultures whose films we work with that we do not have. We collaborate with national archives, with surviving filmmakers and their estates, with historians and scholars who know the work in its original context.

We do not move faster than the work requires.