“Digital cinema is not safe. It is a heritage that, as the years go by, becomes increasingly hypothetical, abandoned on precarious media under the illusion that digital is forever. It is time to act at the European community level, combining public and private interests.” It is from this consideration by Piero Costantini, CEO and Founder of Mnemonica (the B2B cloud platform for content management, sharing, and archiving, which has supported over 1,000 audiovisual productions since 2015, Ed.) that the Manifesto for Digital Cinema Memory was born—a programmatic document created by MNEMONICA to call upon institutions, producers, and industry operators to take responsibility for protecting audiovisual heritage in the post-film era. The Manifesto explores how national and EU regulatory frameworks can improve the protection of digital masters and related assets over time, identifying best practices, concrete policy options, and paths for cooperation.
The Manifesto was launched at the Berlinale’s European Film Market during the FUTURE HERITAGE: Securing the Future of Digital Film Archives panel, where experts in the preservation and enhancement of audiovisual heritage discussed the urgent need to prevent digital cinema from losing its memory, and the ways to do so. Alongside Piero Costantini, the panel included Thomas C. Christensen (Archive Director of the Danish Film Institute), Cecilia Pezzini (Festivals and Classics Acquisition Manager at Coproduction Office Germany), and Simone Appleby (Director of the digital restoration laboratory at the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée – CNC), who sent a presentation to illustrate how, in France, the 2016 Cinema Law stipulates that the digital preservation of works is a requirement for production and post-production funding.
Key themes included: the role of rights holders and technical partners, funding and sustainability models, European data sovereignty, and the urgent need to align production work with long-term preservation requirements, so that native digital European audiovisual heritage remains accessible to future generations.
“Amazon says it will build a new European Cloud, and even though the European Commission considers it unlikely, I think the risk exists, so it is necessary for us to equip ourselves with our own technology for preservation.” Costantini says.
The Manifesto constitutes a call for collective action addressed to institutions, to update national legislation to guarantee the digital protection of cinema, and to producers, so that they recognize professional preservation as the best insurance for the value of their works.
