This article extends from two amateur film projects concerned with examining women’s amateur filmmaking and the development of metadata schemas and archival practices that could foreground women’s contributions to amateur filmmaking. Both “Women in Focus” and “Empowering Archivists” were UK-Ireland projects that facilitated collaborations between archivists, researchers and community groups to collectively think of ways to better represent, value and preserve amateur films made by women. One of the findings of these projects has been the understanding that women’s amateur filmmaking necessitated looking beyond the film content to the material objects of the films themselves.