Bregtje van der Haak – The Netherlands – 2014

We all have an album or a box with old family pictures that make us nostalgic about the old days. But what will happen when future generations want to look back in time? ‘Digital Amnesia’ is a most interesting documentary that looks deeper into our memory, or better: into the danger of forgetting in the digital era.

Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?

This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder by Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria, who is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge hub for the digital world.

Duration: 52 minutes

Language: English, Arabic (English subtitles)