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| Author | Zoe Aresti |
The BFI (British Film Institute) has launched ‘Britain on Film’, an archive-based initiative through which thousands of unseen films have been digitised and will be made available for free to the public on the BFI Player platform.
By 2017, the BFI aims to have digitised 10,000 film and TV titles from 1895 to the present day, backed by National Lottery funding and the support of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
These include the world’s earliest home movies from 1902, The Passmore Family Collection - 10 films of the family on holiday in Bognor Regis and The Isle of Wight and at home in London.
Britain On Film also includes travelogues, tourism films, public information docs, newsreels, a few feature films and a host of other material
What unites all the footage - taken from the BFI National Archive and more than a dozen other archives across the country - is that most of it has remained largely unseen since it was first filmed.
This article first appeared on Screendaily.