The 2006 National Film Registry was announced today and it includes
"Think of Me First as a Person," a fantastic amateur film that was
first shown publicly at New Orleans Home Movie Day last summer.

As Home Movie Day 2006 was approaching, we were contacted by George
Ingmire, a New Orleans filmmaker, who was preparing to transfer some
of his grandfather's home movies. George had acquired his
grandfather's films, and was particularly interested in one 16mm reel
that appeared to be one of the only edited reels in the collection.
It was a compilation of home movie footage of his son, Dwight Core,
Jr., from 1960 to 1975. Dwight, Jr. has Down Syndrome (he is now 46
and living in Norfolk, Virginia) and the film is a beautiful and
powerful look at raising a disabled child in the 1960s, and
particularly the pain in sending him off to a residential school in
Lynchburg.

George sent the reel to Home Movie Depot for a new video transfer, and
then combined the film with an audio soundtrack that he had found on a
separate VHS tape. The Home Movie Day screening was the first public
screening of the restored version of the film, and as far as we can
tell the first time the original film had ever been shown publicly.
The second screening was a the Association of Moving Image Archivists'
conference in November. Last week George visited Virginia and
screened the DVD for his family, including Dwight, Jr.

George Ingmire is currently working on a website for the film and is
preparing to make it available for festival screenings and The Center
for Home Movies is in discussion with him to get the original film
preserved. George is also in the process of transfering more of his
grandfather's collection to video for a future documentary film his is
developing about him.

Press release about 2006 Registry:
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2006/06-234.html

Dwight Swanson