A new depository of the National Film Archive has been established in Hradištko

photo: www.archdesign.cz

Hradištko - A new depository of the National Film Archive (NFA) was opened today in Hradištko near Prague, which will accommodate up to 100 million meters of film. The building, whose construction cost 155 million crowns, will provide a stable environment for valuable film materials as well as non-film collections. The installed technologies will now be tested and fine-tuned, and then the challenging moving process will begin, which will take about ten years.

The building will accommodate 10,000 negatives of feature films and 21,000 negatives of non-feature films, as well as 4,000 reproducing film materials, which were once used to produce copies and which today serve very well for digitization, and also 15,000 film copies. "The capacity of the depository is calculated so that there is still some reserve, but we know that the amount of film material will not increase because the film era has ended, and we are in the digital era, so we will rather have to strengthen digital storage," said NFA General Director Michal Bregant to ČTK.

The depository, covering 1,820 square meters of floor area and 21,500 square meters of built space, was started in the spring of 2015 by Hochtief CZ in the area of the current depositories from the 1970s and 1990s, according to the design by architect Martin Kotík and the project of Arch.Design. The project was financed by the Ministry of Culture's program. "It is a very well-invested amount from the state budget," said Minister Daniel Herman (KDU-ČSL).

According to Bregant, the construction took a bit longer than planned because the original project did not account for a digital laboratory, which had to be changed. The digital laboratory is now part of the building, so film materials designated for digitization will not have to be moved anywhere. According to the director, it is also important that the final price was ultimately lower than originally planned.

According to Bregant, the depository meets the strictest standards. A humidity level of 35 percent will prevent the film from drying out and shrinking, while a constant temperature of minus five degrees Celsius will halt the chemical processes that shorten the lifespan of the material. Before moving to the new building, each film will pass through an acclimatization chamber, where it will spend 24 hours. "Each roll of film must be checked frame by frame, after which it will pass through the acclimatization room, where it will get used to the new conditions," Bregant stated. Once the films are capable of transitioning to temperatures below freezing, they will be transferred to the depositories evenly so that the building's load is not one-sided.

The depository will primarily house all color productions from the 1950s to the present day, but also safeguarding materials for older films that NFA has copied onto non-flammable materials. This includes films by Hermína Týrlová, Jiří Trnka, and Karel Zeman, among others. However, some valuable black-and-white films will also be moved to the building, such as the collection of works by Jan Kříženecký, a pioneer of Czech cinema from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the first scientific films, collections of Czech avant-garde films, for example, works by Alexander Hackenschmied, and documents and advertisements from Baťa or the collection of films by travelers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund. The national cultural monument, the record of the trial of Milada Horáková, will also be stored there.