Stage In Development
Genre documentary
An intimate portrait of the engineers racing to preserve the world's surviving stock of magnetic audio tape before the acetate backing degrades into silence.
Somewhere between 40 and 60% of all recorded human sound — the majority of the 20th century's sonic culture — exists only on magnetic tape. The tape is degrading. The playback equipment is failing. The engineers who know how to operate it are aging out. THE LAST ANALOG follows three archival engineers — at the Library of Congress, at the British Library, and at a private archive in São Paulo — over one year as they race to digitize what they can before it becomes unplayable. The film is not about nostalgia. It is about what gets lost when a medium dies, and about the people who have chosen to care about it.
Director Owen Davies
Producer Camille Prost
Writer Owen Davies