Amid the irruption of new paradigms to approach the past, thousands of orphan home movies claim their place in institutional conservation programs around the world. These documents, until recently considered minor, pose pressing methodological challenges to the work of film archives. This text explores the material and conceptual characteristics of these films to describe the transition between their original private space and their new custody. In the proposed discussion, the experience of the Proyecto filmoteca.cl is observed to analyze the orphan metaphor of these rescued family images, together with the potentialities, risks and ethical scope of their contemporary use. It is also verified that the growing interest in these films without a program is widening the panorama of Chilean national cinema, expanding its range beyond the aesthetic-narrative canon that marked, without counterweight, the making and archiving during the 20th century.