Margaret Bodde is executive director of the Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 to protect and preserve motion picture history. Since 1991, Bodde has spearheaded the group’s preservation, education, and exhibition programs, resulting in more than 850 films restored and newly accessible to audiences. TFF’s educational program, The Story of Movies, is an interdisciplinary curriculum teaching film history and appreciation to middle and high school students. This innovative program, launched in 2005, reaches more than 100,000 educators in all 50 states. Bodde oversees the foundation’s World Cinema Project, created in 2007 with a mission of preserving neglected films from around the world; 40 films from 24 countries have been preserved and distributed to date. In 2017, the African Film Heritage Project was launched to identify, preserve and disseminate 50 significant African films, working in partnership with the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) and UNESCO. Bodde has also produced many of Scorsese’s documentary films, including: Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), The 50 Year Argument (2014), George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), Public Speaking (2010), No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and the PBS series The Blues (2003). Prior to joining Scorsese, Bodde worked in marketing and distribution at Miramax Films and as a preservation officer at the Library of Congress. She earned her BA in Communications and Film at American University.
Restoration Gives New Life to Lost, Forgotten, or Dismissed Films
“Discoveries like The Juniper Tree inspire us to keep digging and remind us that as we continue to advocate for preservation, one film at a time, we are also expanding and rewriting cinema history.” The Film Foundation director Margaret Bodde on how the foundation restores not just individual films but the legacies or indipendent filmmakers.