The purpose of the Aylon Film Archives is to gather a large volume of digitized film on an online repository.

This material, gets processed, conserved, digitized and finally documented and organised historically.

With the ability to search in detail and with the help of a map and many other tools, the visitor can quickly identify the topic of interest, either for educational or scientific reasons. The documentation helps to better understand the material and integrate it into specific historical and social contexts, turning it into a valid and important tool for scientific research. This repository aims to become an important home-movie archive for post-war Greece.

The available material includes 8mm, super 8, 9.5mm and 16mm films. These are all amateur home-movies. The films cover most of the 1940s and 1980s and are mainly shot in Greece and also abroad.

The importance of film material is multiple.

In terms of content, initially we have a wealth of historical film footage from the political and social life of Greece, coming to light for the first time or from point of view unknown until now. Secondly, part of the film material classified as "family content" lends itself to sociological and anthropological studies as it covers events of people's daily lives and their habits throughout the territory and also capturing the peculiarities of each place over the course of almost half a century. At the same time, daily activities (customs, work, worship, school life, sports, holidays, etc.) recorded in the films, give the opportunity to study in a wide scientific spectrum, acting as research tools.

Generally, the uniqueness of this material, beyond its content, lies in its reception. Unlike other film archives in which the material is the product of a particular activity by e.g. an agency, news reels etc, in our case we have material filmed by individuals found at a particular point in time, either by chance or by interest in watching something and recording it. The everyday observer captures aspects that the "official" camera ignores either intentionally or not. It provides unknown, unfamiliar and often more interesting views, which over time acquire historical value. In addition, we see a different image of people who feel much more relaxed and intimate in front of the lens of their relatives, without the stylization and embarrassment usually imposed by the lens of an agency or channel.

It is essentially the closest to the cinematic experience of reality, which with proper documentation can be a unique and valuable archive of the history of post-war Greece and not only.