09 · 30 · 10

FICM celebrates 50-year anniversary of UNAM Film Archive

Administrador

Directed by Emilio Fernández, Maclovia takes place on the island of Janitzio in Lake Pátzcuaro, where Maclovia (María Felix), the daughter of the regional leader of the Tarascan indigenous community lives. Maclovia loves José María (Pedro Armendáriz), but her father opposes the relationship. The young José María would do anything to win over the young woman’s father, but problems begin when a military batallion arrives, and Sgt. Genovevo de la Garzo (Carlos López Moctezuma) also falls in love with the beautiful Maclovia.

The Filmoteca of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is an institution dedicated to locating, acquiring, identifying, classifying, restoring, evaluating, conserving and distributing films and other objects and documents related to cinematography.

It collects and preserves filmic documents that are used in film cycles, exhibits, classes, conferences, publications, recordings and non-commercial cultural and educational television programs. The archive also has agreements and exchanges with similar international institutions in order to promote and acquire a better knowledge of film in its social, historic, political, aesthetic and technical aspects.

Under the leadership of Manuel González Casanova, the University Archive can trace its beginnings to July 8, 1960, when film producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce gave UNAM Rector Nabor Carrillo a 16 mm copy of his film Raices y torero. With this donation, the film department of the university’s Coordination of Cultural Diffusion started a lending service, which constituted the actual founding of the Filmoteca of the UNAM.

Guadalupe Ferrer, director of the Filmoteca, explains that the archive has “a collection of documentary fragments, including those of the Mexican Revolution and others that date back to the beginning of cinema in our country at the end of the 19th century up to the end of the 1970s. It also conserves a collection of more than 200 pre-cinematographic and cinematographic cameras that shows the technical development of film.”

The Filmoteca of the UNAM, an active member of the International Federation of Film Archives, has a Documentation Center whose collection includes 10,000 posters, 7,000 “lobby cards,” 83,000 photographs of shoots and personalities, a large number of documents, and more than 15,000 specialized publications -- books, magazines and pamphlets. It also has films about national and international cinema in video for researchers’ consultation.

The Filmoteca of the UNAM shows nearly 1,000 films a year and maintains the tradition of film-debate in several of its programs.  Its archive has been very important in the distribution of Mexican film retrospectives internationally by lending approximately 100 copies a year to festivals, universities, institutions and organizations that represent Mexico abroad. It also supports festivals in Mexico that request iconography and copies of film.
 
Every year, the Filmoteca of the UNAM awards the José Rovirosa Prize to the Best Mexican Documentary and the Best Mexican Student Documentary. It also gives the Filmoteca Medal of the UNAM – elaborated from the silver that results from restoring film in its library – to outstanding personalities of the cinematographic world.