Deserted Films

A Cultural Memory Archive

Deserted Films is an archive in Palm Springs that collects, preserves, and digitizes historically significant home movies and other rare films depicting the Coachella Valley and Southern California more broadly. We educate the public through presentations of these films online and in-person. We do not sell stock footage. All donations, stipends for presentations, and ticket sales for our fundraiser shows go towards our film preservation efforts benefiting researchers, students, and other local nonprofits with whom we collaborate. They also help us off-set the cost of our public outreach efforts (tabling at civic events, educational screenings...) described below.

Drs. Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron founded Deserted Films in Palm Springs in 2021 and incorporated as a nonprofit in July 2022. In 2023, it was federally recognized as a 501(c)(3). A bit about us: We collect, care for and make accessible films shot in the general Palm Springs region -- by locals and tourists -- during that golden age of nontheatrical film from the 1920s-1990s when 16mm, 8mm, Super 8 celluloid film and video cameras (instead of our phones!) were the tools we used to preserve our memories. The collection also houses a fair bit of footage of Southern California, generally, and our surrounding desert regions. If a film documents a historical event (or historically under-represented peoples), we grab it too. To date, our archive consists of over 2,000 films, photographs, and other ephemera (800+ items are digitized and on our website).

Coachella Valley Filipino Festival 2025.
Photo by Andrea Heck Addington.

Outreach and Collaborations

Educational Screenings: Our outreach endeavors have included pairing home movies from our collection with feature films we introduce at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, or including them in our educational -- and entertaining we think! -- presentations (winter holidays, Black History Month, Women's History Month, Home Movie Day) at the Palm Springs Public Library. We've presented quite a few times during Modernism Week, also at Maleza, and for the Rotary Club of Indio and Seven Lakes Country Club. 

Collaborations: While we do not sell footage, we contributed clips for the "Section 14" exhibit at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, and created a 15-minute looping video documenting the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival from the 1940s through the 1970s for the museum in the Sands of Time Building at the Riverside County Fair & National Date Festival (2026). 

This woman recognized herself in a home movie of the 1958 Date Festival Parade in Indio that we screened during Modernism Week a couple of years ago. Here she is posing next to the same footage used in our looping video of the Fair/Festival.

In June 2025, we collaborated with The LGBTQ+ History & Archives of the Desert, Palm Springs Cultural Center (venue) and the UCLA Film and Television Archive on “Home Movies Out of the Closet: LGBTQ+, Hollywood, Palm Springs, and You!”,  a screening of rarely and never-before-seen LGBTQ+ home movie footage from our collections.

In November 2025, we hosted a information table at the Coachella Valley Filipino Festival as a way to help folks think through personal archiving needs -- what to do with those family home movies, photographs, slides, and otherwise -- and we are doing the same at the Black History Committee's Town Fair in Palm Springs (February 28, 2026). We also have an application in for an information table at ONE-PS's annual picnic in March, and will do so for Palm Springs Pride in November. 

How We Spent the Funding We Received Last Year

Last summer, we preserved an additional 31 films, and purchased a humidity controlled refrigerator to aid in the preservation of decaying films.

Palm Springs Life (August 2024)

Testimonials & Press

For their August 2024 issue, Palm Springs Life magazine did a feature on us! Our holiday shows at the Palm Springs Cultural Center have made the Palm Springs Post's holiday guide for the past three years, also Palm Springs Life's, and others. Most recently, Steve Sumrall from NBC Palm Springs interviewed us for a The Roggin Report‘s “Desert in a Minute” segment. It aired December 17, 2025. Most recently, Kendall Balchan wrote a nice piece about us and our participation in the Fair/Festival for The Indio Post on February 4th.