Lost ‘holy grail’ film of life in Brazil’s Amazon.Found!

[John Green]

"A long-lost Amazon documentary described as “the holy grail of Brazilian silent cinema” has been rediscovered nearly a century after it went missing.

Amazonas, Maior Rio do Mundo (Amazon: Longest River in the World)was stolen from the original director, Silvino Santos, shortly after it was made in 1918. Just over a decade later, it had completely disappeared. The film resurfaced earlier this year in a Czech archive and was identified by specialists in Italy and Brazil.

“It’s basically a miracle,” said Sávio Stoco, the Brazilian expert on Santos who confirmed the discovery. “We didn’t have the slightest hope that this work would one day be found.”
"...a negative copy of an older, now disintegrated nitrate print of the film survived at the Národní filmový archiv, in Prague, where it had been miscatalogued as a US production from around 1925."

www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/07/lost-holy-grail-film-of-life-in-brazil-amazon-100-years-ago-resurfaces

[John Wall]

👆That’s what happens as archives are digitised. Every can is opened and the contents checked against the label and any other paperwork. It’s now much easier to find out if something is missing or to send it electronically to a specialist. We’ve had it with TV programmes as some of the archives hadn’t been properly catalogued so no one really knew what was there. There will almost certainly be more like this, but every can found to have contents that match the label is one less to provide a surprise.

[sonnybh]

The recent feature I was reading about missing films mentions a few cases where prints have turned up unexpectedly in archives in other countries.

One being the pioneering film Within Our Gates, one of the first films made by a Black director. It was considered lost until a copy turned up in a Spanish archive. It's been restored though the captions on the reels were in Spanish & had to be retranslated.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Within_Our_Gates

[richardwoods]

Amazing. There’s hope for Evil of the Daleks yet. 😉