Before TFF, watching many classics felt like looking at a faded photograph through fogged glass. Their restorations remove scratches, dirt, and warping without succumbing to the modern sin of digital over-smoothing (which erases grain and makes actors look like wax figures).
In 1990, director Martin Scorsese received a stark warning from a studio archivist: over half of all American films made before 1950 had already been lost forever, and the rate of decay was accelerating. Shocked into action, Scorsese gathered a group of fellow directors—including Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg—to form a non-profit organization with a simple, monumental mission: to preserve and present moving images. films restored by the film foundation
That organization is The Film Foundation (TFF). For over three decades, it has become the world’s most influential advocate for film preservation, restoring hundreds of films from dozens of countries. To date, the foundation has helped restore over 1,000 films and has made them accessible to new generations of audiences. Before TFF, watching many classics felt like looking
The Film Foundation is aggressively non-Hollywood centric. Its "World Cinema Project" (launched in 2007) specifically targets films from countries lacking preservation infrastructure. Shocked into action, Scorsese gathered a group of