[2023] Penthaz

Training in digital film restoration – Skills enhancement

Visit to the archive and presentation of the methodologies and techniques used for digitization and image processing in the Film Archive’s restoration laboratory.

Training offered as part of the Jocelyne Saab Association project to set up a digital restoration sector in Lebanon.

In partnership with the Swiss Film Archive.

The Jocelyne Saab Association’s work on distribution, restoration and promotion between 2019 and 2022 has raised a number of challenges. The challenge of making Jocelyne Saab’s films visible in order to arouse the interest of institutions, the challenge of managing to work without any real financial support, the challenge of giving meaning to our activity in the face of the difficulties encountered.

From the outset, the idea of restoring Jocelyne Saab’s films was based on one principle: to work only with people for whom Jocelyne Saab’s cinema was self-evident, without conditions, without hindsight.

We worked to ensure that part of the restoration work could be carried out in Lebanon by post-production professionals, and we worked in such a way as to be able to follow, train and teach the various stages of film restoration, without delegating this work on the memory of images to national institutions or private companies.  

We have obtained the support of leading restoration institutions such as FIAF, the Swiss Film Archive and INA, who have helped us train our teams in scanning, digital restoration and color-grading techniques. These partnerships continue, and the teams trained in 2021 will continue to benefit from the expertise of the professionals attached to these institutions to develop their skills. The aim of the project is to continue this training work and enable other images to resurface.

However, during the work on Jocelyne Saab’s films, the restorers (sound, image, color-grading) faced many challenges. Today, we feel it is important to offer these professionals the opportunity to visit a national archive with the laboratories and machinery needed to restore films on site, without the need for a private service provider. The Swiss Film Archive has such facilities. We’ve set up a partnership with the Film Archive’s technical departments so that ten people from our teams trained in the restoration of Jocelyne Saab’s films (scanning, image restoration, sound restoration, color grading) can visit the Swiss Film Archive’s premises and continue their training in contact with the Film Archive’s professionals, to whom they can ask any questions they may have.

Color grading and sound restoration are professional disciplines that already exist in Lebanon: color grading is one of the final stages in the post-production of any film, and sound restoration has long been applied to music – the digitization of the records in the Amar Foundation collection, for example, has led to a major sound restoration project. Skills in these disciplines therefore exist in Lebanon, but it is important to give these technical skills a new framework for reflection, so that we can think about safeguarding film heritage and the ethical issues this raises.

On the other hand, know-how in digital image restoration using professional software did not exist in Lebanon. By organizing training courses with the support of FIAF and the Swiss Film Archive, a small team took shape in Beirut. The professionals in this team work on Diamant HS-Art software and have restored all of Jocelyne Saab’s 16mm documentary work. They needed to continue their training, to find answers to the questions raised by the restoration work, and to acquire new tools for processing, in particular, other types of images (35 mm fiction film; video, etc.).