2026 UCLA Festival of Preservation

The Archive’s biennial UCLA Festival of Preservation, which began in 1988, showcases its latest preservation and restoration projects on the big screen at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum. Each edition of the Festival presents beloved, award-winning titles from the canon alongside more obscure works ready for rediscovery, all newly preserved and restored from the best-surviving materials.

Ranging from silent-era gems to mid-century television rarities to 1990s independent productions, the 2026 Festival will present 11 feature films, three TV episodes and more than a dozen short works, including world and regional premieres. We are proud to open the Festival with the Los Angeles restoration premiere of Black Girl (1972), directed by civil rights icon Ossie Davis and adapted by J. E. Franklin from her play, a landmark of Black theater. Other highlights will include the restoration world premieres of Maurice Tourneur’s painterly silent drama Lorna Doone (1922), the Constance Bennett screwball comedy Merrily We Live (1938), André de Toth’s L.A. noir Pitfall (1948) and delightful Fleischer Studios cartoons. Also making its theatrical debut is a new restoration of Budd Boetticher’s The Magnificent Matador (1955), filmed in Mexico in dazzling Eastmancolor. The work of prolific and pioneering director Lela Swift will be a focus of the Festival’s television offerings, preserved from rare kinescopes and shown with original commercials.

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