You’ve been meaning to watch those old home movies for years, but the ancient reels you inherited perhaps didn’t come with the clunky projector required for viewing.

Well, no more excuses. It’s time to rescue those old memories from your junk closet and share them with the world – or at least with the other home-movie geeks gathering at the Home Movie Day event in Durham on Saturday.

Home Movie Day is described as a worldwide celebration of amateur home movies. In addition to watching movies, it’s the perfect opportunity to meet and talk with local film archivists about the virtues of film and how to properly care for it so that your movies last forever.

The free event is co-sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke Archive of Documentary Arts and A/V Geeks Transfer Service, a Raleigh film transfer company. Skip Elsheimer, the founder of A/V Geeks, will be the host and film archiving expert on hand.

Folks are encouraged to bring 8mm, Super8mm or 16mm home movies to watch. No video (that means no VHS), slides or digital movies.

If you don’t have any old movies but want to watch other peoples’ movies, that’s OK, too.

Home Movie Day was started in 2002 as a way for film archivists to spread the word about the importance of home movies, not just as family records, but as historical records for the places where they were shot. Archivists stress that transferring old films to DVD may be more convenient for regular viewing, but the originals should never be tossed.

Cain: 919-829-4579