Kingston Heritage Film Project

The Kingston Film Heritage Project is an initiative to preserve and digitize the history of Kingston on film. With support from the Kingston Heritage Fund and the City of Kingston, the Vulnerable Media Lab has been able to research and restore elements of Kingston’s film history. With an initial focus on 16mm films found in Queen’s Film Department archives, and with an eventual goal to expand into materials from the Kingston community at large, the project is an ongoing initiative seeking to restore lost or hidden histories. A database of the scanned films will be made available online in spring 2025.

Some of the initial findings of the project were screened as part of a series entitled Vault Investigations in the summer of 2024, where the scans of 16mm films were screened in an informal setting at Queen’s University. The first screening, Notes on the University, focused on Queen’s as an institution in Kingston and the experiences of students and faculty in relation to the community at large. The second screening, Prison Films, focused on materials in the archive that were shot within the local prisons, including a play made by inmates, prison fires, and dramas set in the local prisons. Future threads of research include the filmic histories of marginalized populations and their experiences in Kingston.