Before Home Movie Day, there was the Festival of American Folklife, which in 1974 put out a call for home movies and used the films that were contributed to make a documentary titled “Home Movie: An American Folk Art.”
Thanks to the people at Folkstreams.net, you can now watch the film in Real or MPEG-4 format.
A little more about the film:
In 1974, as part of the Family Folklore Program of the Festival of American Folklife, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., put out a call for families to bring in their home movies and have portions of them copied for a documentary film. More than 100 families responded to the call, bringing in 16 mm and 8mm home movies, as well as photo albums. The result was the documentary, Home Movie: An American Folk Art by Ernst Star, then a student in the film department at Temple University, and Steve Zeitlin, a student in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.