Since our founding, San Francisco Silent Film Festival has been proud to have had a role in the preservation of cinematic heritage through presentation—festivals like ours participate in the preservation cycle by bringing appreciative audiences to bear witness to the extraordinary breadth and depth of silent-era filmmaking. But in the past several years, SFSFF has had a direct hand in the restoration and preservation of silent-era titles. Through our preservation fund, in partnership with organizations such as BFI, MoMA, Cinémathèque Française, EYE Filmmuseum, Library of Congress, the Film Preservation Society, Gosfilmofond, and the Polish National Film Archive, we have restored and preserved Behind the Door, Les Deux Timides, Fragment of an Empire, The Good Bad Man, The Half-Breed, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Italian Straw Hat, The Last Edition, Mothers of Men, The Other Woman’s Story, Sherlock Holmes, Silence, Soft Shoes, The Three Musketeers, What’s the World Coming To?, When the Earth Trembled, and a fragment of Now We’re in the Air as well as newly discovered San Francisco, 1906 footage shoot days after the Great Earthquake!
We are gratified to have brought these titles back to life and are committed to showcasing important restorations and preservations for years to come. We create new 35mm negatives and prints for all of our preserved titles. Our film collection is stored in the SFSFF Collection at the Library of Congress.
