Rescued Film Project

The rescued film project is dedicated to rescuing lost and forgotten rolls of film from all over the world. Levi Bettwieser is running that project dedicated to rescuing and archiving these historical images which otherwise would be lost or destroyed.

Among the rescued rolls there is a series of images taken by a world war two soldier which had never been developed. Watch the video below. This is an impressive documentary by Levi Bettwieser about his passion and the series of rolls shot by this soldier 70 years ago that are developed and watched at for the first time.

Once again I learn that images on film have an incredibly long life. Film is probably one of the most persistent storage media for any kind of data. I often ask my self whether my digital image archive will still be available, usable, and searchable in 15 years time given technological development. However, the film negatives from my early days of photography as a child more than 25 years ago are still physically there, I can scan them, process the scans and use them like any digital image today. Same for the pile of slides from my father and grandfather that will never expire.

Levi Bettweiser develops the film in small series by hand at home in his kitchen. He says that developing film which has been stored somewhere most likely under non ideal conditions is a case buy case hand craft. For this kind of film a commercial lab processing hundreds of films per day would just not get the results needed for these historical testimonials.



In order to rescue more film, Levi Bettwieser is running a crowdfunding campaign in order to raise money for development of another stock of 66 bundles of film which is approximately 1200 rolls.