Time to Pull Out Your Asian-American Family’s Home Movies

Forget the faux-retro Instagram filters. We're talking legitimately old footage.

By Julianne Hing Jan 03, 2014

Do you remember your family’s old home movies? The ones of your uncles’ childhood living room games and your grandmother’s 50th birthday on nearly obsolete 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm formats? If your family is Asian American, the Center for Asian American Media wants you to dig them out of their dusty boxes for a new project called Memories to Light. Launched in December, the project is a community history project of sorts. They’re asking folks to send in their original home movies, which CAAM will digitize and share in an online public archive.

"Our mission is to present stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences and home movies are an unacknowledged, and yet rich, part of that history," CAAM Executive Director Stephen Gong says. "We hope to inspire future generations and connect them to the past and to the visual record of how earlier generations became Asian American."

CAAM has released bits of the footage they’ve collected so far, and they provide a wonderful glimpse at the past. Learn more about how you can participate at CAAM’s website.