"Home Movie Day is important because our lives, our recollections, and our truth is recorded in home movies. One day, what the heck, c'mon!" - Steve Martin
The 7th annual Home Movie Day will take place in Baltimore on Saturday, October 17, 2009, at The Strand Theater (1823 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201) from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Members of the public are invited to bring their home movies to a local event where they will be inspected by HMD projectionists and shared with an enthusiastic audience in a day-long celebration of amateur filmmaking and home movie preservation.
The enduring success of Home Movie Day lies in the thrill of uncovering original film footage of places, people and events-both familiar and strange-that may have rested unseen in household closets for decades. At a 2006 Home Movie Day event in New Haven, Connecticut, amateur film maker Robbins Barstow shared his 1956 travelogue "Disneyland Dream," which captured his family's visit to the Magic Kingdom in its first year of operation. Also captured in the background? A fleeting glimpse of future comedian Steve Martin selling guidebooks in a top hat and striped pink shirt. Barstow's film, a hit with his local Home Movie Day audience, has delighted ever-larger audiences: it was made available to the public on archive.org (where Steve Martin recognized himself in his unwitting cameo), popularized on the pop-culture site boingboing.net , and ultimately added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2008.
Given the natural tendency to photograph the famous, celebrity spottings in films screened at Home Movie Day events are not unusual--but equally fascinating to audiences are more familiar subjects: local streets and businesses seen as they were in a bygone year, the changing pastimes of children playing in the yard or on the sidewalk, and those wonderful automobiles of yesteryear.
Conceived by archivists at the Center for Home Movies as a means to promote the preservation of amateur films, Home Movie Day has grown each year from its initial slate of two dozen locations across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Japan in 2003 to over fifty venues in nine countries in 2008. For each event, members of the public are encouraged to search their homes for home movies in formats which they may no longer have the means of viewing - commonly 8mm, Super8 and 16mm, but some sites accept VHS video as well - and bring them to Home Movie Day, where trained event staff can assess their condition and project them on the big screen to a wider circle of attendees who come to each year's unpredictable screening of home-made entertainments. The events are open to all and free of charge.
