SAHIA VINTAGE is a digital history platform of documentary film produced in Romania, at the Alexandru Sahia studio, between 1950-1990. It is part of a larger public history project that involves digitising and making accessible the film heritage associated with this studio.
The project began in 2013 with the first of an annual series of Sahia screenings at the One World Romania festival (Bucharest) and continued between 2014 and 2019 with the release of five DVDs, curated by theme, from the Sahia archive. In 2016, we began to take these films to high schools and neighbourhoods in Bucharest and beyond, where we screened them with introductory presentations and q&a sessions.
We have included the term ‘vintage’ in the title of our project to note the increased intensity of our relationship with the past in the present of the 2000s. With the increase in the temporal distance between the moments when these films were made and now, two interweaving nostalgias, one for the past, the other for the technology and media of that past, affect how we relate to the material. We need to be mindful of how we manage both.
The current version of the platform represents the pilot project that is to be built upon in the coming years to offer material of interest to the general public and content to be used as teaching tools in high school and university courses.
