A new DVD release from the IFI Irish Film Archive and BIFF Productions is set to illuminate one of the most fascinating and rarely seen chapters of Irish film history. The surviving silent films from The O'Kalem Collection have been brought together, remastered and will be available alongside a feature length documentary Blazing the Trail. Between 1910 and 1914 the O'Kalems made almost thirty films adapted from well-known songs, poems and dramas or original scenarios dealing with Irish history or the experience of emigration to the United States. They were extremely popular with American audiences and laid some of the templates and stereotypes that defined Hollywood perspectives on Ireland over the next half century. Blazing the Trail, a feature-length documentary that is included on this DVD release, explores the history, films and legacy of the O'Kalems with a focus on Sidney Alcott and Gene Gauntier. Producer Tony Tracy and Director Peter Flynn, both of whom played leading roles in helping bringing The O'Kalem Collection together, tell the story of these filmmaking pioneers through memoirs, eyewitness recordings, scholars, and the films themselves, revealing a way of life and a way of filmmaking long since passed.