Introducing The Memory Project

The past is closer than you think. 

That was the starting point for The Memory Project. A web series that searches through old home movies to find stories of ordinary people. Real lives, real moments, lost to time… Until now. 

There are thousands of these abandoned films out there, collected and digitised by film libraries. Many are in the public domain, without any indication of who the people were, or even sometimes when and where the footage was shot. We’ve scoured hundreds of them for this project.

The premise is simple: we take one of these abandoned films, recut and remix it to create something beautiful. The episodes are short – no more than a couple of minutes – and most are made up of a single reel of film. But they all have a story to tell. 

Season one will take us to the New York World’s Fair of 1939, with footage so colourful and vivid that some of it might have been shot yesterday. In another episode, we’ll see small-town America at the time of the Great Depression, through one man’s home movie camera – and what he finds will surprise you. We’ll also visit Paris of the early ‘60s, with a group of enthusiastic American tourists living their best lives. And later, we’ll catch dreamlike glimpses of other, ordinary lives from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, in ways that may make you stop thinking of them as people of the past at all. 

That’s the other reason for making the Memory Project now, as a free-to-air series on YouTube. This series has been created and released entirely during the current lockdown due to Covid-19. It’s a scary and difficult time. This crisis touches the lives of everybody. But we invite you to watch the people in these films. Look into their faces. They look a lot like you, don’t they? All those people lived in difficult times. They faced worse hardship than this. And yet, life went on. When those challenges were over, the world went on. It always does.

Perhaps that’s the central theme of The Memory Project. Life goes on. 

And the past is closer than you think. 

Episode 1 of the Memory Project premieres on YouTube and Facebook, April 15^th.