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"To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" runs from November 4-25, 2015 and features 74 newly restored masterworks and rediscovers including films by Chantal Ackerman, Dario Argento, Samuel Fuller, Orson Welles and many more. Read More: 10 Rare Gems MoMA Just Saved from Obscurity Special guests for the series include Oja Kodar, Stefan Droessler, Guy Maddin, Chris Langdon, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako ("Timbuktu") and noted film historians John Canemaker, Tom Gunning and Eddie Muller. Maddin will introduce two films on the silent program including “Pan,” the 1922 film by Harald Schwenzen based on the novel by Knut Hamsun; and “Monsieur Don’t Care,” a 1924 comedy short starring Stan Laurel in his pre-Oliver Hardy days. Indiewire recently spoke to Maddin over the phone about why these two films matter to him and about the state of film preservation. Why these two films in particular? Although, I...

African-American film 'Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day.' With Williams and Odessa Warren Grey.* Rare, early 20th-century African-American film among San Francisco Silent Film Festival highlights Directed by Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter, the Biograph Company's Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913) was the film I most looked forward to at the 2015 edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. One hundred years old, unfinished, and destined to be scrapped and tossed into the dust bin, it rose from the ashes. Starring entertainer Bert Williams – whose film appearances have virtually disappeared, but whose legacy lives on – Lime Kiln Club Field Day has become a rare example of African-American life in the first years of the 20th century. In the introduction to the film, the audience was treated to a treasure trove of Black memorabilia: sheet music, stills, promotional material, and newspaper clippings that survive. Details of the...

Flicker Alley will release the rarely seen 1929 Norweigan silent film epic Laila on DVD on May 17.

Alice O’Fredericks (l.) and Mona Mårtenson share a moment in Laila.

The romantic melodrama movie stars Mona Martenson as Laila, a young girl separated from her parents as a baby and raised by a wealthy reindeer owner Aslag (Peter Malberg) in the frozen tundra of Scandinavia. Though she is returned a year later, Laila grows into a young woman of two worlds, at home with both her settled and nomadic upbringings. Laila soon finds herself in a love triangle with her foster brother Mellet (Henry Gleditsch) and her cousin Anders (Harald Schwenzen), played out against the backdrop of an encroaching plague.

Directed by Danish-German filmmaker and noted cinematographer George Schnéevoigt, Laila was digitally restored by the Norwegian Film institute in 2006 and is now being presented in this new edition with the cooperation of...