HOUSE OF FILM - cinematheque and archive

Authors’ Comment

The project emerged from the real context, which is, the situation of the National’s Film Archive in Romania. The Archive has a great and wealthy collection, containing books, magazines, posters etc. All this legacy of the Romanian and international film is found in the basement of the Filmmakers’ Union, being kept in a damaging environment. All these and the fact that they are not offered to the public, puts them in the danger of loss and oblivion. So, the project imagines a House of Film, which brings together both programs: the archive and the projection space, into a single shouse which is strongly connected to its own needs. Back in the 60’s the site hosted a summer garden where film projections took place, so this brings a memorial dimension to it. The logic of the project starts from the void, and could be defined by two main gestures: the turning around to its own self, and the other one, its exposure, its way of being seen and be showed to the street and the city.
The project deals with contrasts because like the universe of the cinematheque it works with elemets of the past using modern tools.