One of the core missions of the Virginia Film Festival is to further enhance its well-earned reputation for offering audiences new perspectives on classic films. One of the ways the Festival is doing that today is through an innovative partnership with the Library of Congress (LOC) and its Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, located just up the road in a former Cold War bunker in Culpeper, Virginia. This year marked the 5th anniversary of “The Virginia Film Festival and the Library of Congress Celebrate the National Film Registry,” a series that brings the Festival and Library of Congress together to leverage one of the world’s most comprehensive film, television, and audio collections with the University’s resources and experts. “We are delighted to join with the Library of Congress for a partnership that is truly the only one of its kind when it comes to film festivals in America. The Library’s passion and capabilities when it comes to film preservation are unmatched in the world, and we are honored to be part of celebrating the National Film Registry and to offer our audiences opportunities to see the most important films in American history so lovingly restored and beautifully presented,” said Festival Director Jody Kielbasa. Past series have featured iconic titles including The General (1926); National Velvet (1944); The Manchurian Candidate (1962); and Badlands (1973) – featuring a conversation with Sissy Spacek and her husband, Art Director Jack Fisk, hosted by Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz.In 2012, the Festival presented a special screening of All the President’s Men (1976) that brought together its LOC series with the popular Presidency in Film series, presented in conjunction with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The evening was capped off with a memorable conversation with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, moderated by former Virginia Governor and Miller Center director and CEO Gerald Baliles. The VFF/LOC partnership took another exciting step forward this November when famed film historian and critic Leonard Maltin, a longtime board member of the National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress (which selects 25 films for inclusion into the National Film Registry each year), acted as a guest programmer for the series and led post- screening discussions of a number of films.