This paper investigates the removal of line scratches from old moving pictures and gives a twofold contribution. First, it presents a simple technique for detecting the scratches, based on an analysis of the statistics of the grey levels. Second, the scratch removal is approached as an optimisation problem, which is solved by using a genetic algorithm. The method can be classified as a static approach, as it works independently on each single frame of the sequence. It does not require any a-priori knowledge of the absolute position of the scratch, nor an external starting population of chromosomes for the genetic algorithm. The central column of the line scratch once detected is changed with a conventional linear interpolation; this transformation is the starting point of the optimisation process