The first phase focused on assembling and contextualizing the research collection and beginning systematic qualitative analysis. Home movies were located in private, family, community, and institutional collections in the United States, with additional material identified in Poland. Films and tapes were reviewed, selected, digitized, documented, and prepared for research use using specialist archival infrastructure and external providers.
The scale of the corpus exceeds the original plan. The project anticipated approximately 150 home movies or excerpts; 544 home movies have already been digitized, around 3.6 times the planned number. Oral-history interviews were completed with 65 participants, compared with a planned minimum of 60. The sample retained the intended gender balance and included substantial representation of working-class filmmakers, bringing into the research perspectives often less visible in histories of amateur filmmaking.
The interviews also generated a richer body of evidence than expected. Instead of the projected 1.5–2.5 hours, interviews lasted more than three hours on average, with some conducted across several sessions. Many were supplemented by film- and video-elicitation: digitized recordings were watched together with filmmakers or family members. These sessions helped identify people, places, dates, and events and generated information about production, viewing, circulation, preservation, and family memory that could not be derived from the images alone.
The collection contains substantial bodies of both film and video, including filmmakers who used more than one technology. It provides a basis for tracing changes from small-gauge film to analog video in recording, editing, viewing, and circulation. The corpus also contains extensive evidence of transnational exchange: films made during visits from the United States to Poland, recordings intended for relatives across the Atlantic, histories of cameras and tapes moving between the two countries, and recorded audio letters.
The films, interviews, and contextual data are being systematically coded and analyzed across themes including technology, gender, class, generation, transnational circulation, community archiving, and migrant identity. The publication program is ahead of plan: four research papers were initially envisaged, while at least six scholarly texts are now underway—one published, one accepted for publication, two submitted and under review, and two in preparation.
A major achievement was the rediscovery of Góralskie wesele (Highlanders Wedding, 1961), an 88-minute color 16 mm amateur film with optical sound made by Polish Highlander immigrants in Chicago. Previously considered lost and unknown to film scholarship, it has been professionally preserved and digitized in 4K, with new preservation elements produced. Its recovery provides an exceptional source for studying migration, community performance, cultural continuity, and vernacular filmmaking.
