Film archives bridge the past with the present as well as the local with the global. The challenge facing curators, which has only increased in the 2020s, is how to make these bridges legible and tangible for an audience. One possible solution is to present repertory screenings, a popular staple of Minneapolis film culture that has persevered through the pandemic.
That’s where Archives on Screen, Twin Cities, comes in. The initiative aims to “[make] visible excluded images from the past” of global cinema through screenings hosted by local venues. Archives on Screen will host the second edition of its annual Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour festival Thursday through Saturday at The Main Cinema in Minneapolis, with a closing night screening taking place Sunday at the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights.
The event, spearheaded by local film curators Maggie Hennefeld and Michelle Baroody, is a series of 13 titles from four continents selected from the premier repertory festival hosted in Bologna, Italy. Hennefeld said the screenings reinforce “community building, education and outreach.”
Beginnings and connections
Hennefeld and Baroody’s professional relationship goes back nearly a decade when they first met at the University of Minnesota in 2015. Hennefeld had accepted a teaching position in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department where Baroody was finishing her Ph.D. Their friendship, affectionately described by Hennefeld as “a heartwarming Bert and Ernie dynamic,” was fortified by a shared passion for film. “We both … connected over seeing lots of works, particularly new restorations of silent cinema and global political cinema, that we really wanted to curate in the Twin Cities,” she said.
Baroody has established connections within Minneapolis’ cinephile community since 2011, from previously serving on Trylon Cinema’s board to her current role as film programming curator for Mizna’s cultural screenings, most notably the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival.
“We know there’s an audience for this type of film history and culture here locally,” Hennefeld said.
Resilience and adaptation
That conviction inspired Hennefeld and Baroody to pursue several projects within and outside of an academic setting. Hennefeld initially sought to launch the Twin Cities Silent Film Project in 2020, but COVID put a temporary halt to any plans. Instead, both responded to the tumultuous state of the industry by co-publishing an issue of Framework. In their co-penned introduction, Hennefeld and Baroody declared that the medium “has spectacularly outlasted its own death more times than Wyle E. Coyote [sic].” As Baroody elaborates, “that project also led us to talking more and more about …what kinds of films … we want to see on screens in the Twin Cities.”
Two years after that article’s publication, Hennefeld and Baroody launched the inaugural edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour at The Main Cinema in May 2023 with funding from the Imagine Fund Special Events Grant, courtesy of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at the University of Minnesota. The two-day showcase included international films ranging from the silent era to the early 1990s.
Growing partnerships
Besides the university, Archives on Screen, Twin Cities, has thrived off of the work of entrepreneurs and individuals like Nazeeh Alghazawneh, who has offered his awtt.haaus website as the ostensible home for Archives on Screen.
“The partnership of awtt.haaus and Archives on Screen is a natural, logical one because we occupy opposite ends of the same intersection: for them, it’s to expand the exhibition of restored and archival repertory programming within the Twin Cities and for me, it’s to champion and promote that niche curation,” Alghazawneh said in a written statement.
In addition to awtt.haaus, Archives on Screen is bringing different cultural communities in the Twin Cities together. Some of those partners include local musicians like Molly Raben and The Poor Nobodys who will be providing live accompaniment to screenings.
Archives on Screen also seeks to blend entertainment with stirring ripostes to longstanding misconceptions of nations outside of the West. Following the Twin Cities Iranian Culture Collective’s screening of “The Stranger and the Fog,” Archives on Screen will present “The Ballad of Tara,” another film by the lauded Iranian playwright and filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie. Additionally, Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour’s “Leila and the Wolves” foregrounds the political vitality of women throughout the history of Arab liberation. By emphasizing strong central female characters, Baroody argues that these films complicate the placement of Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian peoples and communities “into very small boxes and categories.”
Film and the future
Hennefeld and Baroody look forward to further challenging and expanding historical narratives through future screenings. They said early conversations are being held with a Walker Art Center curator on possible public screenings from the Walker’s archive.
Additionally, plans are underway for a collaboration with artist and curator Ralph Crowder III under the banner of Media Archives for the Future of candid home movies filmed by Black residents of South Minneapolis in the 1950s and 1960s.
By starting from a global vantage point, Archives on Screen strives to make immediate the importance of preserving and restoring not only the films but, per Hennefeld, “the kind of energy that goes into bringing things … that were important in a moment.” Their work reminds us that such moments, re-evaluated outside their original context, provide candidly universal mirrors into our own time and place.