Is This the World's Rarest Film? One Man's Garage Operation Is Producing Something Special

Handmade film from a single person's garage in Ukraine, made in batches of exactly 20 rolls a month, sounds like a niche curiosity. But the results from this orthochromatic, high-silver emulsion are turning heads even among the most experienced people in the analog film world.

Coming to you from Ari Jaaksi - I Shoot On Film, this fascinating video introduces a film emulsion unlike anything currently on the commercial market. Jaaksi received a few rolls from Vitalii Kovalyshyn, one of two Ukrainians behind the project, after Kovalchin reached out to say he admired Jaaksi's aesthetic and wanted to share what he and Igor Polyakov had been building. The handmade orthochromatic film sits at around ISO 20 and contains significantly more silver than standard commercial film stock. That silver content is what Jaaksi believes gives the film its distinctive quality: deep, lush tonal shades that are hard to replicate with anything mass-produced.

What makes Polyakov's work even more remarkable is the sheer difficulty of what he's doing. Getting an emulsion to adhere evenly to a film base is, according to Polyakov, the hardest part of the entire process, not sourcing the materials, not working out the chemistry. For a long time, the layers kept separating. His current solution uses two emulsion layers: one that bonds to the base, and the actual imaging emulsion on top of that. Mark Osterman, a Rochester-based artist doing similar handmade emulsion work, was so impressed by Polyakov's results that he requested a Zoom call just to understand the process. Those two may be among the only people on the planet doing this independently, in their own labs.

Being orthochromatic means the film responds to light differently than standard panchromatic film. Reds render darker, while blues and greens in natural scenes come out lighter. Jaaksi leans into these characteristics intentionally, using them as creative tools rather than working around them. The imperfections that come with a handmade product, the slight inconsistencies inherent to a 20-roll monthly batch, are part of what draws him to it. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Jaaksi, including more of the images he shot on this film and his thoughts on how to use its quirks to your advantage.