The Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive contains over 380 individual film items on the heritage of the six counties of Northern Ireland for the first hundred years of the moving image.
Film Archives
The unique film heritage of Northern Ireland and the city of Derry is preserved in two digital collections of archive material - The Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive and The North West Film Archive. These two film archives together contain over 150 hours of moving images, including television programmes from BBC, UTV, RTE and C4, documentaries, amateur home movie footage, feature length drama and newsreels.
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The Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive contains over 380 individual film items on the heritage of the six counties of Northern Ireland for the first hundred years of the moving image. |
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The North West Film Archive affords us a unique glimpse of the counties of Derry and Donegal through the lens of local filmmakers. For long before the city became the focus of international media attention, local film enthusiasts were recording the social and cultural life of Derry with home movie cameras. |
Both film archives are accessible on computer with fully searchable databases. They are contained within a dedicated ground floor space in Magazine Studios, next door to the Nerve Centre.
1897 - The Lumiere brothers in Belfast
In 1897, two years after the invention of cinema, the French filmmakers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, came to Ireland with their movie camera. They captured the first known moving images of Belfast, an important commercial and industrial centre in the 19th century. These enduring images of the city herald the new age of the moving image. Through the lens of the inventors of cinema, we can journey back to that moment in time when the advent of a new art form changed the world forever.
(Clip from the N.Ireland Digital Film Archive)