Thank you for your helpful comments!
I talked to the people who rescued the film again. The film, shot at 16fps, was usually played back at 24fps when it was shown, so they used 24fps and transferred it to 29.975 video using a 3:2 pulldown. I thought they had laid it to tape at 24fps!
So, the simplest thing for me to do, would be to recapture at 29.97, edit, and then export at 29.97, and put into DVD SP.
If I did want to slow the film down to 16fps, what is the best way to do that so that I don’t have ghosting on the images?