54 Films to be Preserved by the 2026 NFPF Preservation Grants
The National Film Preservation Foundation is proud to announce the winners of its 2026 federally funded grants. 30 institutions—eight new to our grant programs—will use these awards to preserve 54 films. Since its creation by Congress in 1996, the NFPF has provided support to 356 institutions in every state, to save films unprotected by commercial interests. As always, this year’s grants will ensure that each film is fully preserved on film, with celluloid and digital access copies made available to the public. The grant winners exemplify the widely—and wildly—varying types of “orphan films” that the NFPF was created to preserve. Five genres take the spotlight this year: community portraits, documentaries, industrial films, experimental works, and silents.
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The University of Virginia will preserve footage of John Jackson, the Piedmont blues fingerpicking ace, performing at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, ca. 1972.
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The community portraits include a diverse set of collections from the Midwest. The South Side Home Movie Project will preserve 28 reels, shot between 1940 and 1958, from the Ramon Williams Collection, documenting mid-century African American social life and cultural events in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville community, including parades, dances, church ceremonies, and sports events. From another part of Chicago come three films to be preserved by Tatra Mountain Cultural Foundation, made between 1954 and 1958 to document the cultural life of the Polish American community centered around the Pulaski Village ballroom in the Pilsen neighborhood, and showing the collision of Polish Highlander song with American polka. Also hailing from the Windy City are five amateur films shot between 1937 and 1970s depicting its Filipino American community, created by unofficial community documentarian Nicholas Viernes, which will be preserved by the Filipino American Historical Society. The Jackson County Historical Society, also in Illinois, will preserve a town portrait of Murphysboro, filmed in 1938 and covering everything from coal mine activity to the production line at the Dr. Pepper bottling plant.
West coast community portraits are also represented. Visual Communications will preserve Vaitafe: Running Water (1981), one of the earliest community-produced narrative fiction films centering on Pacific Islander life in the US. It follows a student immigrant who manages to find his way by relying on the traditions of the Samoan American community of Los Angeles. The Hagley Museum and Library will preserve Where the River Enters the Sea (1982). This docudrama, winner of the CINE Golden Eagle award, was developed by the NANA Regional Corp. of Alaska, with its 15,500 Iñupiat shareholders, and presents a fictionalized portrait of an Iñupiat family played by native Alaskans who live in a remote Arctic Circle village and struggle to preserve their traditional culture and history. Also from Alaska are three films created in 1970 for the SKYRIVER Lower Yukon Project, which allowed residents of the remote Yu’pik village of Emmonak to directly communicate their concerns over public health, native land allotment, and local schools. These will be preserved by the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association.
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Rival deep-sea divers clash in Partners of the Tide (1921), directed and produced by Irvin Willat. The San Francisco Film Preserve will handle its restoration.
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The 2026 grant winners also include a group of vivid documentaries. Chris Gamboni’s Going Out of Business (1977), to be preserved by the Chicago Film Society, is an elegy for a doomed small machine-works on Long Island that exclusively made film splicers. Third World Newsreel will preserve A Dream is What You Wake Up From (1978), an interweaving of interviews, verité footage, and docudrama recreations that examines African American family life in Harlem and suburban New Jersey. It was praised by The New Yorker in 2018 as “prescient in its passionate, analytical view of inequities regarding gender, race, and class.” Set-Up (1971), filmed by Emmy-Award winner Nicholas Doob, is a portrait of Donald Horner, a 28-year-old New Haven resident released from a 10-year prison sentence. Inspired by the techniques of Robert Flaherty, the film allows Horner to express himself to the camera, view that footage, and reflect on the film in progress. Yale Film Archive will handle the preservation.
The very different realm of industrial film presents another set of treasures, focused on the glory years of aviation. The Pan Am Historical Foundation will preserve footage by Robert Fulton, inventor of the “Airphibian” flying car and Skyhook extraction device, who was hired by Pan American Airways in 1936 to film airbase construction in the Midway and Wake Islands for the first trans-Pacific passenger service route, flown by the China Clipper. Washington University in St. Louis will preserve footage shot by Leif “Jack” Johan Sverdrup, who during WWII was tasked with establishing airstrips and supply routes on Papua New Guinea to facilitate General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign to retake the Philippines. Sverdrup’s films are notable for documenting the manual labor of air-strip construction performed by the indigenous Papuan and New Guinean people. The Mid-Atlantic Air Museum will preserve five films from Custer Channel Wing Corporation made between the 1940s and ’60s, documenting the development and testing of experimental Custer Channel Wing aircraft.
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A parade in Chicago's Bronzeville community, documented in the Ramon Williams Collection (1949-58), to be preserved by the South Side Home Movie Project.
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Another wildly different genre featured this year is experimental film. The Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will preserve Jordan Belson's Cycles (1974), which represents spiritual development through a merger of film and video technology, and Infinity (1979), a transformation of live-action footage into increasingly abstract forms. UCLA Film & Television Archive will oversee the preservation of Cycles (1989) by L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, whose feature Compensation (1999/2024) joined the National Film Registry in 2024. The short combines meditative imagery and stop-motion animation, and was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “a brilliant and innovative reflection on Black womanhood.” The Block Museum will preserve Metamorphosis (1962) and Passages (1982) by Rowena Pattee Kryder, an overlooked figure from the era of postwar artisanal animation, better known for her contributions to West Coast New Age subculture. The Chicago Film Society will preserve five shorts by Chicago artist Jean Sousa, which combine performance, dance, and elaborate optical printing, while Collaborative Cataloging Japan will handle the preservation of three films by Akiko Iimura and Takahiko Iimura, who linked the Japanese and New York avant-gardes during the 1960s and 1970s and documented protest activity and countercultural happenings.
The realm of silent cinema is vividly represented by Partners of the Tide (1921). Produced and directed by Irvin Willat, this feature completes an informal aquatic trilogy begun with his notorious revenge thriller Behind the Door (1919) and continued by Below the Surface (1920, also preserved through the NFPF Partners, the story of rival deep-sea divers, boasts two shipwrecks, an onboard fire, and an underwater fight to the death in a sunken ship. The San Francisco Film Preserve will oversee the preservation. Chicago Film Archives will preserve two 1929 editions of the Chicago Daily News Screen Service, a local newsreel that covered everything from the ordination of Miss Illinois to dramatic auto accidents and a roller-skating competition. George Eastman Museum will preserve the surviving reels of Builders of Castles (1917), an Edison feature about a woman targeted by fraudulent building and loan schemes used by get-rich-quick corporations to prey on working-class homebuyers, and the surviving reel of Scar Hanan (1925), the first in a series of FBO Pictures westerns starring legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt.
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Passages (1982), an experimental animation by Rowena Pattee Kryder, to be preserved by the Block Museum.
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Also slated for preservation are footage of Paul Newman and his daughter Nell assisting in peregrine falcon conservation; Moppets in Space (1969), a short pairing of watercolor paintings by school children with narrated commentary by Apollo 8 astronauts; performance footage of Piedmont-style blues guitarist John Jackson; and Picasso: the Saltimbanques, created for a National Gallery exhibition celebrating the artist’s centennial and influences. For a full list of the films, click here.
National Film Preservation Foundation grants are made possible by funds authorized through The Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016, secured through the leadership of the Library of Congress, and the contributions of public-spirited donors. The awards provide support to create a film preservation master and two access copies of each work. Films saved through the NFPF programs are used in education and seen widely through screenings, exhibits, and streaming. A curated selection of preserved films is available for viewing on the NFPF website, and more than 380 additional titles have been made accessible by our grant recipients. We’ll have more grant news to announce this fall, so watch this space!