The second result was the implicit acknowledgment that the state was responsible for the care of its documentary heritage.
The BFI continues its vital contribution to making the rich heritage of British documentary movies generally available.
To advocates of crowd-sourcing like Ms. Leon, making the country's documentary heritage available to the public is one of the most valuable aspects of that approach.
Now, the floodgates have opened, there are a few other British silent films I would like to nominate for representing "documentary heritage of global significance and outstanding universal value".
It has been accused for years by the Israeli press and an international committee of specialists of failing to properly protect the country's documentary heritage because of its leaky ceilings, insufficient budgets, crowded storage space and outmoded technology.
The Memory of the World register, set up in 1992, is aimed at preserving humanity's documentary heritage, and currently holds 348 documents and archives that come from countries all over the world.
That's because statues and memorials are not the mechanism through which we learn or remember history: books, museums, memorial days, heritage attractions and television documentaries, among others, perform that task.
"There's a lot of rich countries in Africa," said Farida Khelfa, a representative for Maison Schiaparelli of Algerian heritage who recently filmed a documentary on the Arab Spring's effects on young North Africans.
Ben Affleck has admitted he was "embarrassed" about a slave-owning ancestor and says that's why he lobbied television chiefs to hide his story in a documentary about his heritage.
"That archive is a remarkable window not just into Haight-Ashbury and the dawn of the modern rock theater, but to all the documentary evidence and heritage of the counterculture and all the issues historians are concerned about in discussing the 1960s".
