Lorenzo Pevarello: From family film to community film

The intervention traces the experience of the Cineteca of the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino, starting from a reflection on the transition from family film to community film, a path developed over nearly thirty years of activity involving archiving, historical research, and public dissemination. The archive of family films initially arose from the need to recover, safeguard, and digitize amateur reels in small formats — 8mm, Super8, and 16mm — preserved in Trentino families’ homes. From the early oral history projects and particularly with the experience of the Memorie di comunità, it became clear that these materials were not only private documents linked to family memory but also held a visual heritage capable of telling, in a remarkably direct way, the transformations of the territory and communities. Within these images, one finds landscapes now profoundly changed, vanished agricultural and forestry practices, moments of sociality, collective rituals, forms of work, and relationships that belong to the recent history of Trentino. Gradually, there emerged an awareness that these films told much more than the story of a single family: they narrated the history of a community. From this, the conceptual shift from family film to community film was born. This transition also redefined the role of the Cineteca, no longer seen solely as a place for conserving audiovisual materials, but as a relational space where archive, memory, and research meet. The true specificity of the Cineteca lies in the fact that the collections are never disconnected from the people, families, and communities that produced and safeguarded them over time. Through the work of collection, digitization, historical contextualization, and public sharing, images born in private contexts are brought back to life in the collective space, becoming historical sources and tools of public history. From this perspective, the Cineteca becomes not only a place of preservation but also a laboratory of knowledge and shared storytelling of the territory.

Tommasino Andreatta Alpine Estate

Summer in Valfloriana by Paolo Arnoldi

Lorenzo Pevarello

Lorenzo Pevarello is an author, director, and researcher at the Trentino Historical Museum Foundation, where he is responsible for the Film Archive. Active for over thirty years in the field of audiovisual documentation and documentary production, he has developed his professional path through directing, historical research, and the enhancement of visual memory. After initial experiences as a cinematographer and director of photography, he worked as an author and director in the fields of historical, artistic, and anthropological documentary filmmaking, creating over one hundred works selected at national and international festivals. Alongside, he has gained extensive experience in collecting oral testimonies, conducting over a thousand audiovisual interviews dedicated to the social history of the twentieth century, mountain life, labor, agriculture, and territorial transformations in Trentino. Within the Trentino Historical Museum Foundation, he is among the promoters of campaigns for the recovery and digitization of slow-motion footage, which led to the creation of the Family Films Archive. His current work focuses on the relationship between audiovisual archives, oral history, and public history, with particular attention to the processes of public restitution of community memories.

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