Photo courtesy of Autumn Chapman.
Kate Burney in Sintra, Portugal.
The movies we love don’t just entertain us — they preserve the values, fears, dreams and identities of the people who made them. For Homewood resident Kate Burney, protecting those films means protecting something much larger: our collective cultural memory.
It’s a mission that has taken the Sidewalk Cinema and Film Festival development assistant from Birmingham to Belgium, Portugal, and soon Ireland and Estonia as part of one of the world’s only graduate programs dedicated to film heritage and restoration.
“I didn’t know there was a way to be in the film industry without making films,” Burney said. “When I learned there were people whose job was to care for what already exists, that felt like stewardship.”
Burney’s path into film preservation wasn’t a conventional one. She earned undergraduate degrees in film studies and global studies at Montana State University before moving to Alabama three years ago to care for her grandmother during the final stage of her life. Only later did she realize that experience had shaped the work she now feels called to do.
“I’ve thought about how providing end-of-life care and preserving old films aren’t as different as they seem,” she said. “It’s about saving what’s left before it’s gone.”
Photo courtesy of Kainat Bashir.
Kate Burney at CINEMATEK Royal Film Archive of Belgium.
That philosophy now drives her studies in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s in Film Heritage, an international graduate program that accepted Burney as one of its first American students. The two-year degree takes students to Belgium, Portugal, Ireland and Estonia, where they work alongside film archivists learning how to preserve the world’s cinematic history.
Film restoration, Burney explained, is about far more than simply converting old reels into digital files.
“Audiovisual materials — whether they’re analog or digital — require enormous amounts of upkeep to survive and remain accessible,” she said. “Technologies age rapidly. So do people. If we don’t train a new generation of skilled technicians, we’re set to lose decades of global film history.”
Without that expertise, she noted, audiences could one day lose access not only to silent-era classics like “Cabiria” (1914), but to contemporary films such as “Sinners” (2025).
For Burney, every film is more than entertainment.
“Every movie is a historical document,” she said. “It’s a primary source. It tells us something about the people and the culture that created it.”
That belief shapes her work at Sidewalk Cinema and Film Festival, where she serves as a development assistant while also presenting public film lectures. Her annual “Cinema all’Italiana” series, presented in partnership with the Italian American Heritage Society, gives audiences the historical and cultural context behind each featured film.
“If we can get people to turn their brains on instead of off when they watch a movie, we’ve accomplished something,” Burney said. “Movies should start conversations, not end them.”
She also believes those conversations are most meaningful when they happen together.
“Storytelling is meant to happen in community,” she said. “Watching a film with other people — and talking about it afterward — is part of what makes it meaningful.”
Looking ahead, Burney hopes to bring her international training back to Alabama and help preserve the state’s own filmmaking legacy. Birmingham already safeguards its music, civil rights and community history, she said. One day, she’d like to see its independent film history preserved with the same care.
