In 2009 over 850 cans of film were rescued from a discard pile at a defunct Russian Cultural Centre in Amman, Jordan. Eventually they came to the attention of Matthew Epler, an American who was then teaching in Jordan. This website was created by Epler with the aim of use crowdsourcing to identify and translate the labels on the cans, with a view to eventually digitising the films and creating an online resource for scholars and researchers, as well as recovering the history of what appears to be a culturally significant find.
Epler and his colleagues photographed the label on each can and created an online database of images, with fields for researchers to comment. So far, with the assistance of interested researchers, nearly 600 labels have been translated. The material spans five decades from the 1930s to the 1980s and most of it comes from SovExportFilm, a Soviet film agency. A number of clips have been digitised and can be viewed here. Among the films identified so far are a documentary confirmed to be part of the PLO Film Archive, lost since 1985; footage of King Hussein in 1968 addressing the United Nations in the aftermath of the Six Day War and documentary footage of Jerusalem in 1968 and its aftermath.
The site is currently (Nov. 2014) inactive but some of the footage can still be viewed on the Moving Image Archive News site.