The aim of this article is to study the use of home movies in films made with an autobiographical approach, in which the film-makers employ domestic material as personal archives in their quest to build a narrative out of their lives and the lives of their families. I will propose three different ways in which home movies are recycled in this context: naturalization, contradiction and historicization. These three approaches show the diversity and richness of meanings that these personal archives acquire when they become public in autobiographical films. For this analysis, I will draw from the work of film-makers such as Ross McElwee, Lise Yasui, Alina Marazzi or Michal Aviad.