Lana, montagne e Felix il gatto

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 films made in the Piemonte before VHS and digital video. Forty-five families from the Biella area donated 1,304 films, 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 figures – these home movies portray family rituals (confirmations, 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 reflect on the contingent trajectories through which personal and collective memory is shaped.