The GFA has the largest film archive in Greece with over 10.000 titles of Greek and international works.
These include 2.100 copies of foreign feature films, 600 copies of Greek features, 300 Greek and 700 foreign documentaries, 81 Greek and 119 foreign short films and 1.000.000 meters of rare archival material from newsreels, amateur and home videos, to name a few numbers. Since 1990, there is also a conservation and restoration laboratory.
Concerning the current period its main goals are:
To modernise and expand the activities of the laboratory, which at the moment only offers services for the material kept in Agia Paraskevi (Conservation, Cataloguing, Collection, Access). However even to do that effectively it would need to hire new personnel, which is already accounted in the budget. Plans are underway to expand Tainiothiki’s lab to be able to undertake photochemical works in a state of the art environment). Given that most private laboratories specializing in photochemical work are now closed the only way that Greece can preserve and valorize its film heritage is to acquire such a lab.
Based in our collection and in the network of the European and world Cinematheque we would like to valorize the Greek film heritage. There were already digitized 50 hours of fiction, documentaries and newsreels whih were digitized in 2000? In 2017 Social corruption, a silent film from our collection which was restored and digitised with the help of Cinematheque Royale des Bruxelles, to proceed to the restoration of other films from our collection. For this we would need to mobilize recourses from various private and public foundations. One of our projects in which has been currently completed is the restoration of Les Apaches d’Athenes (1930) a copy of which was found in La Cinematheque Francaise, the copy is in nitrate and the Greek Film Archive in collaboration with Cinematheque Francaise has proceeded in a diligent restoration at the laboratory of Imagine Ritrovata in Paris and Bologna. This project was realized with the generous donation of Stavros Niarchos Foundation.. There are other projects, underway such as restoring the film “Lagiarni” 1930, which is part of our collection. Another task is the digitization and restoration of many talkie films both fiction an documentaries, in our collection.
