Invention

Director: Mark Lewis

Year: 2010

Cinema Museum comprises four nine minute shots of a tour guide leading us around the labyrinthine corridors of a vast private collection of movie ephemera. The guide’s soft, measured voice soothes the ear while our eyes gawp at a teeming archive verging on chaos. The camera sets out with the stealth of a Stanley Kubrick Steadicam shot, but it soon begins to drift. As the guide walks ahead, the camera lingers over drawers marked ‘Gulag Guns’, boxes of fanzine clippings, spare parts for projectors and bits of Art Deco signage.

Director: Mark Lewis

Year: 2010

Almost everyone has watched a movie in which a person, viewed straight on through the windshield, alone or with passengers, drives a car for some distance. The memorable thing about the scene is that the driver seems to have almost no physical relationship to the vehicle and barely seems to be making any effort to operate it. It is no secret to anyone that what we are watching is a composite scene in which the exterior has been photographed previously and then projected behind the set-up in which the performers have been filmed. Mark Lewis has been fascinated by the technique of back projecting for years and has used it with startling and unusual effects in his work. In Backstory, Lewis invited the Hansard family, which has been instrumental in the provision and development of rear projection for hundreds of Hollywood productions over several decades, to tell (with humour and straight-laced directness) their own story of the heyday of the techniques and their decline and disappearance as they are replaced by new technologies and new tastes in visibility.

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2026

ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY? is a five-channel film by Sadia Pineda Hameed that brings together The Box’s home movie collection and the artist’s personal/family collection. Rasheed Araeen’s chakras, spouting waves, Beatlesmania, a basking shark, hula dance, an Enoch Powell protest, tidal islands and seafoam floating into the air—the archives converge across time to tell the story of the artist’s mother’s migration from one archipelago to another: the Philippines to the British Isles. The film becomes a gathering site for personal and collective experiences of journeys, resilience and belonging. Road trips unexpectedly reenact the archive, footage finds itself out of context, voices commentate the film as if rewatching a home movie together; mimesis, associations and autonomy are central to the retelling. As camcorders became more accessible from the 1970s onwards, home movies were an unconscious means to rebuild personal archives after colonial displacement, extraction and erasure. ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY?, named after the home movie from The Box’s archive 'Perranporth Where Did We Stay?', unfolds as a conversation between the artist and her mother, exploring the three interconnected journeys of migration, holidays and remembering. Produced as part of The Box’s Reimagining the Film Archive programme (BFI Screen Heritage Fund).