The film archive that recovers the historical memory of Costa Rica
Costa Rica
A team from the Costa Rican Center for Film and Audiovisual is safeguarding and digitizing dozens of films containing lost chapters from the Central American country.
The Image Archive of the Costa Rican Center for Film and Audiovisual—a branch of the Ministry of Culture dedicated to preserving national cinema—has been immersed for the past five years in the recovery of Costa Rica's audiovisual heritage, and now this important cultural legacy is being made available to everyone. Like *El negro en Costa Rica* , 90 other Costa Rican documentaries produced between the 1970s and 1980s have been restored, digitized, and uploaded to the web .
The bulk of the Archive's collection comprises works from what is known as State Production, which refers to audiovisual productions created by the Film Center itself—as it is popularly known—starting in 1973, when this body was established as the Film Department. The driving force behind the project was filmmaker María de los Ángeles “Kitico” Moreno, who, after completing her studies in London, convinced the government to venture into film production, and she was subsequently appointed to lead the project.
Moreno recruited a group of professionals from diverse disciplines, including photographers and journalists, and equipped them to document the other side of mid-20th-century Costa Rica, tackling taboo subjects of the time such as the status of women, racism, and social struggles. The audiovisual works of that generation of Costa Rican filmmakers resonate with the present of the Central American country: they denounced the neglect of the working class and exposed the flaws in the Costa Rican welfare state .
“In a way, these are films meant to raise national awareness. You can see in Wacá, the Land of the Bribri how the indigenous problem of land theft hasn't changed at all since 1979. Or how in Twice a Woman, director Patricia Howell denounced the double burden of women. None of that has changed,” explains Alvarado, who leads the small team at the Image Archive, which also includes David Rodríguez, in charge of post-production and digitization, and Alonso Castro, archivist.
The Image Archive was established in 1989 as a new branch of what had been renamed the Costa Rican Film Production Center two years earlier, but which by then was witnessing the end of its golden age. The archive's objective was to safeguard films produced between 1973 and 1989, since the economic crisis that struck Costa Rica in the 1980s led to budget cuts that prevented the Film Center from continuing to operate as the state-run production company and, therefore, from continuing to challenge the government with its stories.
A slow and meticulous process
In 2025, the Film Center was renamed again, and is now called the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Center. While it never returned to being a production company, this cultural institution is alive once more. Upon entering the main hall, a large poster of *El retorno * (The Return), the first Costa Rican film, from 1930, greets visitors. At the back of the hall is a small screening room, and just before it, a lobby decorated with the 16mm film cameras used to film several of the documentaries of yesteryear. On the third floor, Alvarado, Rodríguez, and Castro are working on the next rolls of film they will digitize.
The last one, the archivist, meticulously examines the negative of a 1938 interview with Clodomiro Picado, a prominent Costa Rican scientist. Materials like this predate the founding of the Film Center by decades, but they arrived at the Image Archive over the years through donations and have been incorporated into the catalog.
All audiovisual materials undergo an extensive process, beginning with their evaluation, classification, and description, followed by film cleaning and digitization. After thorough manual cleaning, where every meter of film is inspected with microfiber cloths and specific chemicals depending on the damage to the film stock, the material is passed through a high-resolution scanner that digitizes the film, allowing for light calibration, color correction, and sound synchronization before exporting the final file for preservation.
“But it’s not just about preserving it digitally; it also begins post-production of the film: we have to check if the color values are correct, if the film needs to be edited, if the audio needs to be synchronized, or if subtitles need to be created,” explains Rodríguez, a post-production expert.
None of the three team members have formal training in film restoration, as that discipline is not taught at any Costa Rican university. Rodríguez is an audiovisual producer, Castro is a traditional archivist, and Alvarado is a cultural manager. “We learned through trial and error, and a lot of luck,” says the coordinator.
Four years ago, William Miranda, who had been solely responsible for safeguarding the archive for three decades, retired. Although he eventually trained in film archiving, Miranda worked with very limited resources to preserve the audiovisual material. Even so, the historical archivist managed to keep virtually all the films in good condition and, as his final legacy, arranged for the Film Center to purchase the scanner that was later used to digitize the works.
The story in a wine cellar
In the storage room of the Film Center, dozens of cans of negatives containing the history of Costa Rica are stacked. They range from the first national films, El retorno (1930) and Elvira (1955), to footage of John F. Kennedy's visit to the country in 1963, or the presidential transfer of power in 1914, the oldest document in the entire archive.
“This is, on the one hand, a collection of Costa Rican films, and also a series we call documentary film, which isn't exactly documentary, but rather a historical record. For example, interviews or visits from important figures in history,” Castro explains. Although some materials may have lost pieces of film or sound, he proudly states that almost all the material is practically complete and in good condition.
Now that the Image Archive team has completed the recovery and digitization of the documentary collection, the next phase of their work is to focus on other non-state historical materials that have even come from the homes of citizens.
“It gives us great joy to discover these materials, because it’s like discovering treasures. Each time you discover something new and you fall in love with this profession and what it means to build an archive,” Alvarado comments.
Rodríguez, as a producer, compares the restoration process to making your own film. “When you go to the cinema to present your first film, you connect with each scene, and the same thing happens in this case; it becomes something personal. It’s very exciting because you’re rescuing something that you might have thought was lost or that you didn’t even know existed.”
Armando Quesada Webb, El Pais, Spain