SF DocFest 2024: Film is Dead. Long Live Film!

Filmmakers and subjects in attendance

Exploring the vanishing world of private film collecting, an obsessive, secretive and often illicit world of basement vaults. Passionate cinephiles are devoted to the rescue and preservation of forgotten reels.

Condemned as pirates and hounded by the FBI, film collectors have long lurked in the shadows. Yet their efforts have resulted in the survival of countless films that would otherwise have been lost to history. Archives and studios now look to private hands for long-lost titles and many collectors have begun restoring and releasing films themselves. As analog film fades from memory, the basement-dwellers and bootleggers of old are finally being given their due.

Film is Dead. Long Live Film! is a lively tribute to the private film collector, a celebration of the fetishistic subculture of pre-video movie-love, and a timely reminder of the glories of analog film.