Kids hopped up on Halloween candy, teenage girls preening in one-pieces, swimming tigers seen from the monorail at the zoo, sailboats, puppies, nuns, cocktail parties and snowday igloos – an army of dads and uncles with cameras have turned these real life objects into the wonders of the world of home movies. This Saturday, December 5^th is Home Movie Night at the temporary Chinatown Storefront Library, where from 6-8pm organizers will be serving up homemade slices of cinema.

Usually held annually at the Harvard Film Archive, Home Movie Day is part of a worldwide network of events that shifts home movie viewing from the living room to the public screening room. Unless you’re an estate sale regular, there are few better chances to look at the evidence left by other people’s lives, and these movies (a lot of them on 8 and 16mm film) have about a thousand times more life to them than old clothes and furniture. Emitting sparks of personality left and right, these movies can treat us to a kaleidoscope view into other people’s memories.

Chinatown’s Home Movie Night will be the 11^th such event in Boston, and the program is always different, made up of what the audience has to offer, show-and-tell style.  At last month’s Home Movie Day at the HFA, the colors of the movies moved back and forth between faded Easter-egg pastels, hyper-real Kodachrome and garish video-brights, with music for the silent movies picked out by a man with a box of records and a real knack for setting the right tone. The communal, informal style of the screenings means that the audience can trade back-stories with their movies; the kid onscreen has grown up into the middle-aged guy sitting behind you, who is happy to share the camera tricks he used to make himself disappear in the final shot.

I hesitate to use the word “charming,” since it sounds weirdly nostalgic, but a lot of these 5-10 minutes clips of footage have to be described that way, because charming you is what they do. For all that they are sincere and casual and spontaneous, home movies also slyly, consciously single out moments in time, transforming them into something better than their unrecorded counterparts. On film, shoveling snow in a blizzard is an eerie scene instead of a chore. Elementary-schoolers repeatedly jumping off of the fridge in their pajamas is just some school-night fooling around until someone takes out the video camera and turns it into an awesome silent comedy routine.

People who go out of their way to make home movies–and make them entertaining–know that half the battle of having a good time is telling yourself that you’re having a good time and having the proof afterwards. The fun is in turning the ordinary into a performance, like when a broken arm turns into the opportunity to stage a purple heart-ceremony for a 10-year old boy at a cabin in the Connecticut woods. Against the background of tall pine trees, the marching parade of family members gives us a mini American dream in bold primary colors, a cross between a dream and an episode of an old TV show. Home movies have their loyal devotees, and their own celebrities like Robbins Barstow, the Connecticut amateur filmmaker whose home movie about his family’s trip to Disneyland was selected for the National Film Registry earlier this year.

Liz Coffey, the Harvard Film archivist who’s been running Home Movie Day events here in Boston for nine years, gives me the rundown of home movie genres. Home Life is the umbrella term for birthday-cake-and-enthusiasm fuelled family movies, and travelogues are common, as well as amateur narratives, mostly made by kids. There is plenty of repetition, some boring moments and lots of technical errors, but also room for total surprises; “People never think they’re going to stay for the whole day,” Liz observes, “And then they do.”

This endless, grab-bag variety turns any Home Movie event into an archeological cross-section of times and places, with transplant audiences bringing in contributions from all over, but local home movies can be great visual records of the little details of the past in Boston. In a movie shown at Harvard last month, a Southie family frolics in black-and-white 16mm at Revere Beach in the 1930s, and the hope of getting to see some neighborhood history is part of what prompted Amy Sloper, assistant curator at the Harvard Film archive, to team up with the Chinatown Storefront Library for Saturday’s event. “It’d be great if we could see some home movies shot in Chinatown or from the Chinese-American community in general,” she hopes, but makes sure to note, “we would also love to see any type of home movie people choose to bring!” There are tentative plans of holding movie nights in other Boston neighborhoods like Dorchester or Roxbury in addition to the annual HFA event, and in their roving search for home movies to show, the archivists can also offer tips on film preservation and storage.

Home movies of any time period and format are welcome in Chinatown on December 5^th. Check-in for movies is at 5pm (limit 5 clips to 5 minutes and cue tapes ahead), and the free screenings from 6-8pm are free and open to the public.  Bring your old 8mm, DVD or VHS transfers and video footage of all stripes, whether found in an attic, bought in a thrift store or shot last month. Think about how many great home movies have been mislaid in moves, destroyed by basement floods, tucked into shoeboxes for safekeeping and forgotten about, scratched up, thrown out, melted, mutilated or otherwise lost to oblivion, and come, bringing a film of your own or to appreciate what’s on offer.

–Nellie Kluz