This film has a pretty interesting story behind it. Ferrania is based in Cairo Montenotte, Italy, and at one point was an enormous manufacturer of film. Like, "all the residents of this one town work there" level of enormous, with a vast range of all types of film. They were acquired by 3M in the 60s and continued to crank out a not-insignificant percentage of the world's film supply for decades, until the dwindling market in the 2000s as digital rose in popularity eventually forced them to shut down.
The buildings and machinery sat vacant for a while, until a new group of investors arrived to take over about 10 years ago. Looking back, it was a really interesting time to try and restart production as film had not come back anywhere close to the demand of the market currently. The people involved were just really passionate about getting things up and running again. The original plan was to try and restart production of many different kinds of film. C41 films, slide films, in all kinds of speeds and formats. There was a Kickstarter. This proved to be... difficult.
What they did successfully manage to produce was this - Ferrania P30. It's based on the actual original recipe from the 1950s, which makes it unique even among "classic" films still in production, which have been reformulated since their original introduction. It's about as close as you can get to shooting real deal "old film" that is actually fresh and not something of dubious pedigree that could have been stored either in a freezer, or an attic in Tempe, Arizona. I got in on the original alpha release of the stuff way back in 2017 and I've been hooked ever since. The availability has been intermittent over the years as they've continued to work through issues scaling up production in the old factory, but we've hit a point where it seems to be pretty consistently available again, and I highly recommend giving a roll a try if you're curious.
This photo doesn't really do it justice, it was an incredibly gray and foggy day and this is a very slow and contrasty film that loves light. But I had to take advantage of the fact that our road trip across Europe had led us through Northern Italy and more or less straight to the factory. I thought it would be funny to take a photo of the film just outside of the place it was made, taking it back there after it had already been shipped to me all the way in the United States.
