A New Nonprofit Saves Lost Films, One Frame at a Time

The swift passage of time is rarely a positive, but from a film-lover’s perspective, each year brings the gift of new titles entering the public domain. In 2025, that list includes 1929’s The Cocoanuts (the first Marx Brothers film), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou, and some of the earliest talkies.

But in order for films to survive long enough to make it into the public domain — or get restored back to something resembling their original glory — they need a lot of help along the way. Which is where operations like the San Francisco Film Preserve, a brand new nonprofit dedicated to restoring, preserving and providing access to films, enters the scene.

“In our digital world, people don’t think of it, but these materials are very often one of a kind,” says Robert Byrne, Film Preserve’s board president. “And they are now often more than 100 years old. When they go, they go. If this work isn’t done, it’s gone forever.”

The Film Preserve, just two months old, is actually an offshoot of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), founded in 1996. Kathy Rose O’Regan started doing full-time restoration work for the SFSFF about three years ago; 43 titles have been restored under the festival’s umbrella.

But recently, the work of putting on an annual festival and restoring films year-round started to seem like two separate projects. “The amount of work we were doing kind of exploded,” O’Regan says. “We just got to a point where it was this endless stream of every conference we go to, every festival we’re at, we end up having conversations and being made more and more aware of all these films that are being unearthed and really need to be worked on.”

Now, as the inaugural executive director of the San Francisco Film Preserve, she sees opportunities to expand on the work she was doing at SFSFF. The first title they’ll present to the public is The White Heather, a 1919 silent film by Maurice Tourneur, which will have its “world premiere” on Jan. 24, 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (No one alive has seen this film, Byrne points out.)

Long thought lost, The White Heather tells the story of a Scottish lord who seeks to annul his secret marriage to his housekeeper by destroying their marriage certificate — aboard a sunken yacht. Underwater scenes, technically groundbreaking for the time, ensue.

The film’s only surviving print was found in the Netherlands, which means part of Byrne’s job has been to work with a graphic designer to recreate the original intertitles in English, based on the remaining Dutch version.

Right now, the Film Preserve has three other restorations in progress: Hula (1927), Black Lightning (1924), and You Remember Ellen (1912). Much of their work comes from archives and museums unable to undertake a project themselves — perhaps it’s an American film found in another country’s national vault, or it doesn’t align with the mission of the institution.

Many of O’Regan’s days involve sitting in front of a computer and digitally restoring a film frame by frame. “For The White Heather,” she says, “it took quite a number of months because it was in pretty bad shape. It was decomposing, there was mold. It had been heavily used in its original run in 1919, so it’s covered in scratches.”

Both O’Regan and Byrne stress that there’s a real urgency to the work they do. Look no further than Now We’re in the Air, a believed-to-be-lost 1927 silent film restored by the SFSFF. Of the six original reels, only portions of three were found in the Czech national film archive.

“In the can were index cards that recorded the history of the film,” Byrne says. “They would do periodic inspections of the film and as parts deteriorated, they chop them off and throw them away because it just makes the rest of the film rot.”

Every 10 years, according to the index cards, the film got shorter and shorter. Now, only 20 minutes remain. Imagining all the other films sitting uncatalogued in archives or unknown in private collections, Byrne says, “There’s more work to be done than anyone can possibly do.”

For their first year of operation as an independent entity, the San Francisco Film Preserve has big plans: monthly online talks on film history and restoration; offering two travel grants to the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference; funding a student essay prize with Women and Film History International; and working on Blu-ray collections.

In the most immediate, they’re throwing a launch party on Dec. 18 at 518 Valencia St. in San Francisco. Unlike the SFSFF, they won’t need hundreds of volunteers to put on events, but Byrne says they would love to hear from people with niche skills and an interest in preserving film.

“We want to be a resource for the community because we live in a city that people say awful things about all the time, and I think we’re the luckiest people in the world,” O’Regan says. “You know, we have this thriving film community, people who are incredibly passionate about the arts and culture. I want us to be a significant and worthwhile part of that.”