VINTAGE SAHIA is the archival strand of One World Romania, part of a long-term digitisation and outreach project designed to make heritage audio-visual material of non-fiction produced at the “Alexandru Sahia” Studio (communist Romania’s only documentary film studio) accessible to contemporary scholars and audiences.

Since 2013, the festival has included Sahia curated programmes. From 2014, we produced the VINTAGE SAHIA DVD series, which consists of five broadly-themed DVDs ranging from work, to childhood, to the political commissioning of documentaries, and including a special issue dedicated to the so-called “ephemeral cinema” produced by the studio – films commissioned by various state institutions such as ministries, plants and factories. In 2016, we started taking some of these films into high schools and neighbourhoods of Bucharest, where we screened them with introductory presentations and follow-up conversations.

Having been produced on film stock, and later transferred and circulated on VHS tapes and DVDs, these films are about to enter a new stage in their lifetime. At the end of 2019, the VINTAGE SAHIA project was relocated to an bilingual online platform, which makes some of these films more widely accessible and will serve as the central hub for future digitisation and outreach programmes.

WWW.SAHIAVINTAGE.RO

VINTAGE SAHIA is a digital history platform for documentary film produced at the Alexandru Sahia studio between 1950-1990, conceived as an archeology test of the studio's production culture during the four decades of cohabitation with the communist regime.

The entire strand is curated by Adina Brădeanu.

The program is co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund, National Center of Cinematography, Romanian Filmmakers Union, DACIN-SARA and supported by the National Film Archive.

Contact: sahiavintage@oneworld.ro