Lana, montagne e felix il gatto. I film di famiglia biellesi tra collezione e racconto d’impresa

Between 2016 and 2017, the Biella Centro di Documentazione della Camera del Lavoro and the Ivrea Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa launched “Mi ricordo. L’archivio di tutti”, a project collecting amateur lms made in the Piemonte before VHS and digital video. Forty-ve families from the Biella area donated 1,304 lms, shot between 1937 and 1994 in Super8, 8mm, 9.5mm, and 16mm. Filmed mostly by middle-class inhabitants of an already industrialised region – entrepreneurs, professionals, employees, artisans, workers, and political or trade-union gures – these home movies portray family rituals (con rmations, weddings, funerals) and travels across the world and the Biellese mountains, as documented in the Archivio Cinema Impresa catalogue. Offering an overview of the collection and examining some key fonds, this paper has a twofold aim: to recover and enhance fragments of social, entrepreneurial, working-class, and family life in the Biellese industrial context, and to re ect on the contingent trajectories through which personal and collective memory is shaped.