Restoration

In 1909, a film camera was carried onto Papua New Guinean soil for the first time. The film it produced — Aus dem Leben der Kate auf Deutsch-Neuguinea — documented the life of the Kate people under German colonial rule. The camera negative no longer exists.

What remains is a copy. But a copy of what, and from when?

This was the question at the center of my BA thesis at HTW Berlin, completed in February 2026. Reading a film as a physical object — not just watching it, but examining it — is a form of detective work. Perforation patterns are timestamps: different standards correspond to specific manufacturing periods, often narrowing the date of a print to within a decade. Edge codes are more precise still. The Kodak and Agfa coding systems changed at documented intervals; a 1924–25 edge code on a print labeled “1909” tells you immediately that you are not looking at the original.

Institutional collection history adds a third layer: where a print was held, how it moved between archives, what gaps exist in its documented custody. A film that cannot be accounted for between 1909 and 1960 carries those missing years in its emulsion. During my research at the TIB in Hannover, I found a previously unidentified 35mm duplicate negative — a discovery that materially changed the basis of the work.

The film was later re-edited by the Nazi-era Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm and used as a colonial propaganda tool in German schools. A restoration that simply cleans the image without that context reproduces the function in 2026. My thesis asks what it means to restore a film whose purpose was to dehumanize the people it depicted — and what “faithful restoration” even means when faithfulness to the source is faithfulness to the harm.

The films made by Guinean filmmakers during Guinea-Bissau’s war of liberation are not lost. They are displaced.

Held in European and North American archives, often inaccessible to the communities they document, these films are one of the clearest cases of what archival repatriation means in practice — not the physical return of canisters, but the right of origin communities to access what belongs to them.

In 2022, I began working with Abotcha Mediateca and Geba Films Coop in Guinea-Bissau. I started by giving a talk on the importance of cataloguing and how to do it, then carried out the data entry of the films’ metadata — building the first structured catalog of films made by Guinean filmmakers. Later I contributed to the documentary Sou um simples africano, on the life and work of Amílcar Cabral (dir. Flora Gomes, Sana na N’Hada, and Suleimane Biai): locating archival images of Cabral and the liberation struggle, navigating rights with holding institutions, and helping to get digitized documents and photographs back into the country.

This work involves two kinds of labor. The practical: identifying where materials are held, negotiating rights, building relationships with institutions not designed with repatriation in mind. And the emotional: speaking to filmmakers who made these works during a liberation war and are now asking permission from foreign institutions to see their own films.

Digital repatriation is not a gift. It is a right.