Paolo Cherchi Usai is Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. He is co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, USA, and of Domitor, the international society for the study of early film. His latest book is The Death of Cinema (2001) and he is the author of Silent Cinema: An Introduction (BFI, 2000). He recently completed Passio (2006), a feature silent film based on music by Arvo Pärt.