09/10/2013 - Private gift to the Danish Film Institute’s Film Archive included – among others – two local 1960’s comedies so far missing from the collection

The Danish Film Institute’s Film Archive has a collection of Danish cinema that contains 40,000 titles – from the earliest nitrate film to the latest digital recordings – stored in Glostrup, suburban Copenhagen. Still some were missing, as the archive’s film historian Mikael Braae found out, when examining a private gift to the institute.

“The Sundholm Activity Centre on Amager told us they had quite a lot of old film cans which we might be interested in – and we were quite surprised we saw what they meant: 17 pallets of movie material among dust and mold, app 400 films, some with titles or descriptions, but all rather opaque, which needed to be sorted out,” Braae explained.

“Most of the films were Danish features from the 1960’s-1980’s, some were discarded, either because they were in a poor condition or incomplete, or because we already had them in our collection. There were also a lot of trailers, shorts, documentaries, not to mention heaps of ​​old commercials.”

Among the local productions appeared prints of two comedies, Erik Balling’s Whose Little Girl Are You (literally - 1963), starring Ghita Nørby, Dirch Passer and Maria Garland, and Finn Henriksen’s Life with Daddy (photo - 1967) with Nørby, Morten Grunwald and Marguerite Viby, so far missing in the Archive, because then there was no legislation demanding films to be deposited and saved.

The Archive, which started in two large boxes on the roof of Denmark’s first film museum in 1941, is also responsible for updating the National Filmography, readying prints and clips, securing the collection and digitising the film heritage, as well as operating the Videotheque open to the public in Copenhagen’s Film House.