BACI

BACI: Balkan Cinema

The Balkan Cinema collection is the result of research undertaken by Prof. Karl Kaser in autumn 2015. His original aim was to collect visual material to illustrate his monograph ‘Hollywood in the Balkans’, which was in the final phase of writing. The accommodating staff at the various archives he visited allowed him to collect much more material than needed for the book. Thus, the idea emerged to establish the BACI collection for VASE.

The visual materials incorporated into BACI are stored at the Arhiva Naţională de Filme in Bucharest, the Arkivi Qëndror Shtetëror i filmit and the Arkivi Qëndror i Shtetit in Tirana, the Bălgarskata nacionalna filmoteka in Sofia, the Jugoslovenska kinoteka in Belgrade and the TÜRVAK – Türker İnanoğlu Foundation in Istanbul. The Jugoslovenska kinoteka constitutes the most comprehensive film archive in the Balkans. This is why approximately 140 of the 350 collected items stem from there. BACI comprises posters, commercial material, portraits of film directors, shots of cinemas and studios as well as film stills, and covers the period from approximately 1900 to 1970.