Archivists and Associate Professors Gwyn Hervochon and Alessandro (Alex) Meregaglia were recently invited to participate in a panel discussion at the Kenworthy Silent Film Festival in Moscow, Idaho. The festival featured the premiere of the restored silent film, “Told in the Hills.”
Filmed in 1919 almost entirely in Idaho, the movie was deemed a “lost film” for decades before Boise State English professor Tom Trusky discovered in 1986 that two of the original six reels had been preserved in the Russian film archives, Gosfilmofond. Trusky obtained copies of the reels and , in 1990, showed the film in Lewiston, Idaho, near where the movie was made. After that, the film sat largely dormant. The film reels, along with Trusky’s original research and photographs he found from the filming, are housed in Boise State’s Special Collections and Archives.
In 2024, the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre in Moscow, Idaho, received several grants, including from Boise State’s Idaho Film Collection, to re-digitize those two surviving reels and to work with a filmmaker to use other surviving film materials (still photographs, the photoplay and the intertitle script) to recreate the full-length movie.
Hervochon and Meregaglia coordinated the re-digitization of the film reels and worked closely with the Kenworthy Theatre to digitize photographs from Boise State’s collections. The Kenworthy also commissioned a new score for the entire film, which was performed live at the premiere by local musicians.
The fourth day of the film festival featured Nell Shipman short films. Shipman, a silent film actor and director, established a film studio in Idaho in the 1920s and filmed all those shorts at Priest Lake, in northern Idaho. The Kenworthy commissioned new scores for the Shipman shorts as well, which premiered at the festival. Like “Told in the Hills,” Tom Trusky also located copies of Shipman films through his work researching Idaho film history. Boise State’s Special Collections and Archives houses Nell Shipman’s papers.
The festival received widespread media attention, including a story that aired nationally on NPR’s All Things Considered, a separate story that aired on Northwest Public Broadcasting, and articles in The Spokesman-Review, The Lewiston Tribune, and The Inlander.