George Eastman Museum

The George Eastman Museum will catalog and preserve 1,004 unique film titles in its South Asian cinema collection. A total of 1,285 Indian and Pakistani film prints were in imminent danger of destruction when the Eastman Museum recovered them from an abandoned multiplex in California in 2014, from the British Film Institute National Archive in 2016, and from a shuttered cinema in Houston, Texas in 2017. The museum now holds the largest collection of South Asian films held outside of the Indian subcontinent representing Bollywood, Lollywood, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu productions. This project entails cursory film cleaning, placing each reel of film onto a new core, and placing each reel into a new can. Filmographic information will be published in the museum's online catalog of film records to advance the work of researchers, scholars, and archivists throughout the world. Access to projectable prints will be provided through archival screenings and film loans.