Some Lincolnshire Film-Makers
by Peter Ryde

Nothing re-creates the past so vividly as motion pictures, and when the locations are familiar the impact is greatest of all. To anyone with an interest in 20th Century local history, archive film from their own district offers a very special type of resource material.

In recognition of this, the first UK Regional Film Archive was established in 1976, serving East Anglia, and others quickly followed. Amongst them is the Lincolnshire Film Archive, founded in 1986, which now holds over five hundred titles depicting life and work within the county's historic borders.

Though Boston stood in memorably for a Dutch town in the wartime feature 'One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing', and the now largely forgotten 'The Wild and the Willing' used some Lincolnshire locations, the county has never been much favoured by the big studios. True, the newsreel companies paid an occasional visit, and a wartime propaganda film called 'Country Town' was made in Boston, but most of the motion pictures in the Lincolnshire Film Archive were taken by Lincolnshire people themselves, many of them amatuers or semi-professions, who set out to record the local events of their day for their own personal satisfaction, albeit with the public audience in mind.

This book tells the stories of ten remarkable people, who between them span most of the Twentieth Century, and evaluates the record which their dedication and ingenuity have bequeathed to us.

Extracts from many films in the Archive, including most of those mentioned in this book, can readily be seen in the numerous LFA video compilations available here.

The book is priced £4.95, available in paperback. ISBN 0 9547376 0 1 and can be purchased from the Primetime Video website.