The film starts rolling and, like your very own reality show, it rewinds you back to the 1970s. It’s a Sunday – you can tell by the way sunlight rides the air in a lazy, beautiful dance. The other fat clue is that you’re wearing a slightly embarrassing cowboy outfit, the one your mum, carnival or not, made you wear on those Sunday drives in your dad’s beige Anglia (it’s the 1970s and everything is­ either beige or brown).

The camera pans and your mum bell-bottoms into view, looking impossibly young against a slightly bleached backdrop of a Malta that has long since changed. And look, there are trees. Trees in Malta – who would have imagined that?

Then your dad’s voice, spiked with a hint of self-consciousness, laughs from behind the Super 8 camera, encouraging you to do something cute. And you do what most people would do in front of a camera – you give your future self a 32-tooth smile and a wave.

The Super 8 film was released by Eastman Kodak in 1965 – the advantage it had over the older 8mm film was that the perforations on the side were smaller, thus enlarging the exposed area. Another plus point was that the film could be loaded into a Super 8 camera – which Kodak manufactured specifically for the Super 8 film – in seconds. Even the technologically challenged could just load and shoot because the film didn’t even need to be directly threaded.

The Super 8 motion picture camera became hugely popular and production continued until the 1980s, when it made way for the video camera. Yet it continues to enjoy a cult status with collectors and filmmakers. There’s even a Super 8 app – which recreates the experience of having a Super 8 camera – which was launched as a promotional effort for JJ Abrams’s film Super 8.

Almost five decades since it first started rolling, the Super 8 lives on, constantly surprising us at how many memories 50 feet of film and a whirring camera can capture.