The National Film Archive in Warsaw (Filmoteka Narodowa) has announced that a further raft of classic Polish films is due to be digitally restored.

The archive's director Tadeusz Kowalski said that, "dozens of pictures have already been earmarked for a special digital protection programme."

For 2011, these include much-loved movies such as Jerzy Hoffman's swashbuckling 17th century dramas Colonel Wolodyjowski (1968) and The Deluge (1974) as well as Andrzej Munk's The Blue Cross (1955) and Czeslaw Petelski's The Depot of the Dead (1959).

Kowalski added that as many as 16,000 titles were stored in the institute's archives in Lodz, but warned that "even though stored correctly, they were often in a bad, and in specific instances catastrophic technical state."

Two long-term projects are currently in action, "The Digital Repository of the National Film Archive" and "The Development of a Record System for the Presentation of the Resources of the National Archive."

The latter will include a bilingual internet portal in Polish and English, presenting vintage materials relating to prewar documentary and feature films.

Both projects are being financed by the Ministry of Culture, with this year's restoration plans building on the work completed last year by KinoRP, an enterprise working in conjunction with the National Film Archive.

In 2010, KinoRP restored several classic films including Wojciech Has's The Hourglass Sanatorium (1974) and Aleksander Ford's Knights of the Teutonic Order (1959). (nh)