The special guest: Margaret Bodde (The Film Foundation)

To open this 9th edition, the MIFC welcomed Margaret Bodde, Executive Director of The Film Foundation. On this occasion, she was able to present the missions at the heart of this organization driven by Martin Scorsese as well as the different programs it has put in place to help preserve world heritage cinema. 

Margaret Bodde's masterclass, hosted by Gérald Duchaussoy, began with the trailer for Mohammad Reza Aslani's film The Chess Game of the Wind, distributed this summer by Carlotta in France. Released in 1976, the film was confiscated by the government after the Iranian revolution before disappearing completely from the radar. A few years ago, the original negative was found in Tehran and was taken over by the Film Foundation. After a restoration carried out by L'Image retrouvée and supervised by the director himself and his daughter, The Chess Game of the Wind was able to find its way back to theaters outside his country. 

For the Film Foundation's executive director, this Iranian feature film represents a typical case of the work of her organization, which was founded in 1990 by Martin Scorsese and seven of his close friends: Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg. The idea started with a letter in 1980 from the Raging Bull’s director who was concerned about the lack of preservation of the works after seeing a Los Angeles screening of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Years Itch that was faded. At that point, the goals were clear for the Film Foundation: to protect and preserve film history, to raise awareness and funds, and to build bridges between archives and studios. 

To preserve and restore, the organization surrounded itself with numerous partners, both from the world of archives, namely the Academy Film Archive, the Anthology Film Archives, the BFI, the Cineteca di Bologna, the George Eastman Museum, the Library of Congress, the MoMA, the National Film Preservation Foundation and UCLA, and from the studios, such as Fox (Disney), Universal, Sony, Paramount, MGM and Warner Bros. Relationships built up over time, notably through the persuasiveness of Martin Scorsese, who, at the time of the creation of the Film Foundation, took advantage of the success and esteem of Goodfellas to get through the door and brought with him these huge binders he had created with A, B, and C lists, prioritizing the restoration of the films in their own collections. Fortunately for him, at the time, there was an emerging video market and the economy helped support Marty's advocacy. Moreover, even now, even though ideas for restorations come from the archives and the studios, Martin Scorsese remains a pillar in choosing which films to restore. "It's like he has a nose for it," says Margaret Bodde. 

Since 1990 and its almost artisanal beginnings, the Film Foundation has specialized and professionalized itself, offering numerous programs that have enabled the restoration of some 900 films to date. Margaret Bodde, who has been with the organization for 31 years, after a stint at the Library of Congress and Miramax ("Before the Oscars and prison" she said with a smile) described the various actions of the organization: 

• The first, and most important, remains the program for the preservation of American cinema. And especially for independent cinema. Some of the most vulnerable films are independently produced and, of course, their preservation is crucial precisely because they were made outside the studios, by iconoclastic filmmakers, often women and POC, excluded from the industry. A program that has saved many works from Nina Menkes' Queen of Diamonds to John Cassavetes' Shadows. 
  
  
• Each year, the Film Foundation dedicates a budget to experimental and avant-garde cinema, which is surely one of the most neglected and therefore most likely to disappear permanently. This program has allowed the restoration of 200 films by 78 filmmakers, including Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke. 
  
  
• Since 2007, the Film Foundation has created the World Cinema Project to restore films from regions where resources are scarce and where there is little or no archiving infrastructure. This program was launched at the Cannes Film Festival with the support of Thierry Fremaux and the Cineteca di Bologna. In the process, the Film Foundation recovers the international broadcasting rights of the works allowing their distribution, sometimes for the first time outside their country of origin. To date, the WCP has restored 46 films from 27 countries.
  
  
• The African Film Heritage project was created in 2017 in partnership with the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (Fepaci), Unesco and the Cineteca di Bologna. The goal of the project is to identify, restore and distribute African films of artistic, cultural and historical significance. The AFHP includes 14 projects to date, including recent restorations:  Raoul Peck's Lumumba, Death of a Prophet and Sarah Maldoror's Sambzanga.
  
  
• In response to educational needs and issues, the Foundation created The Story of Movies, the first interdisciplinary program developed by filmmakers, academics and educators, in an effort to educate young people about images. The Story of Movies teaches young people to "read" film and think critically about visual literacy and storytelling. Since its initial distribution in 2005, more than 120,000 teachers in every state in the United States have used the program, reaching 10 million middle and high school students.

Beyond helping people discover or rediscover great works of the 7th art, this work allows the Film Foundation to take a new look at the world history of cinema, showing the astonishing international movements that run through it as well as its ability to capture a zeitgeist. To fund itself, the organization has established multi-year partnerships with other foundations over the years, including the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation headed by Mellody Hobson and board member George Lucas. The Morf Foundation of fellow board member Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas provides annual support. Other foundations such as the Material World Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation and the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé have provided crucial support. And from the beginning, The Film Foundation has created programs in partnership with corporations, such as American Movie Classics (now AMC) and their on-air festival of preservation, which ran for 9 years and raised great awareness and funds for projects. We currently have strong partnerships with Turner Classic Movies and its parent company WarnerMedia. Rolex, Gucci, Netflix and many other companies are also loyal partners. Since 2002, The Film Foundation has aligned itself with the Director's Guild of America, which provides annual support as well as the Foundation's offices in NY and LA.

Films are restored from the original camera negative, unless it no longer exists, in which case the Film Foundation works from the best surviving elements. In collaboration with our archival partners, we travel the world to find the best elements, as they are often found in different archives and collections, and often we are looking for a missing reel or soundtrack, which involves tenacious detective work and puzzle solving. As Margaret Bodde points out, « It often takes us much longer to restore a film than it does the filmmakers to make it ». Whenever possible, the organization consults with a film's director or heir, or other creative collaborators involved in the making of the film, but sometimes, in extreme cases, it also relies on the photographic memories of such members as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

In conclusion of her keynote, Margaret Bodde thanked the distributors, publishers and festival organizers in the room, stressing that their restoration and preservation work would not be very useful if there was no one to disseminate and make it available to a greater audience.