FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

This proposal presents a mid-term field report from My Balkan(s), a multi-year cooperation programme funded by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and reflects on the conditions that enable audiovisual heritage to be unlocked in complex regional contexts. 
The project brings together broadcasters and archives across the Western Balkans to strengthen preservation practices, shared methodologies and responsible access to audiovisual heritage. At this halfway point, the programme offers rich and operational lessons on coordination, trust-building and evidence-based decision-making insights. 
Across the Western Balkans, broadcasters and memory institutions are navigating urgent decisions about carriers, technological gaps, metadata inconsistencies, preservation infrastructures and access rights and all in all, limited resources and restraints while working with diverse organisational capacities and regulatory contexts.  
These situations highlight key tensions between harmonisation and diversity, cooperation and institutional constraints, and access ambitions and rights management frameworks. 
The region remains a     sensitive geopolitical region, where unresolved post-Yugoslav tensions, fragile state institutions and recurrent crises continue to shape the political landscape. Beyond these differences, the project increasingly reveals a strong foundation of shared practices and common heritage across the region. Having evolved within a historically interconnected space over centuries, most institutions also preserve audiovisual collections that were created within the same state framework of former Yugoslavia. This shared archival legacy not only reflects a common past, but also constitutes a concrete basis for cooperation, interoperability and mutual understanding in the present. 
These dynamics have direct implications for audiovisual archives, particularly in relation to cross-border collaboration, rights management, and the circulation of materials and data. 
At the same time, the region is the object of competing external influences from the EU, Russia, China and Turkey, making cooperation projects like My Balkan(s) both strategically valuable and operationally delicate. 
As part of the My Balkan(s) project funded by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, this mid-term panel offers three grounded field perspectives that illustrate how diversity can be transformed into structured cooperation and shared progress and how cultural projects give substantial space to overcome political tensions. 
These perspectives reflect different but complementary functions within the cooperation process, showing how coordination, mediation and analytical tools contribute to structuring collaboration across diverse contexts. 
-RTS (Serbia) as Regional Coordinator 
RTS provides technical and organisational support to partners, helps define shared documentation practices, and pilots a working model for regional memory collaboration. 
-INA (France) as Trusted Third Party 
INA contributes neutral facilitation, methodological frameworks and governance models that reduce risk, harmonise terminologies, and help translate pilot experiments into replicable workflows. The trusted-third-party posture enables partners to align on rights, ethics and sustainable operational choices. 
-Matières Premières (France) as Heritage Analyst 
Through comparative analysis of the participating collections, the team identifies patterns of risk, selection priorities and value opportunities. Lightweight analytical tools help partners make evidence-based decisions on digitisation, platform design, and editorial uses without over-engineering processes. 
Together, the speakers will present successes, obstacles, and practical tools adopted by the team to encourage building trust to achieve operational results. The session demonstrates how trust, coordination and situated analysis can turn structural and cultural diversity into long-term capacity for preservation, access and public value. This convergence of situations makes it possible to develop approaches and practices within the project that are not only locally relevant, but transferable and applicable across the different archives. It also demonstrates how collaborative work enables partners facing comparable challenges to overcome political frontiers by working on common issues and interests. 

In the high-pressure environment of major broadcasting, the demand for archival media is defined by speed, precision, and instant availability. At Globo, managing decades of rich audiovisual heritage across Journalism, Sports, and Entertainment requires a constant evolution of archival strategies. The Globo Mídia project represents the latest strategic leap in this journey, designed to amplify the reach and agility of our media ecosystem through advanced data structures.


The core of Globo Mídia lies in the implementation of ontologies that structure vast amounts of media data, providing a unified semantic language across the company. This framework provides the necessary context for AI-driven initiatives, ensuring that technology acts as a powerful ally in metadata extraction and information retrieval. By creating these intelligent connections, Globo Mídia ensures high-speed discovery and accuracy, even in the most demanding and time-sensitive production scenarios.


The ultimate goal of this technological advancement is to liberate the researcher’s eye. By using the Globo Mídia ecosystem to automate mechanical indexing and repetitive tagging, we empower our specialists to transcend labor-intensive tasks. This shift allows the human researcher to focus entirely on their role as a strategic content partner and curator, applying historical sensitivity and deep creative insight to the development of new products.


At Globo, we believe that technology should handle the scale and complexity of the data so that human intelligence can drive the storytelling. We will demonstrate how Globo Mídia bridges the gap between massive archival collections and high-demand production needs, ensuring that our historical assets are instantly accessible to fuel future creativity and narrative excellence.

Early 20th-century archaeological expeditions produced a rich body of visual material: film footage, field photographs, lantern slides documenting landscapes, excavation methods and cultural contexts. Dispersed across museums, university libraries and national film archives, these film collections remain difficult to discover, cross-reference or integrate into contemporary research. This presentation reports on an ongoing project that applies AI techniques to support descriptive cataloguing and access in digitized early film archives.
The project centers on a corpus of records from institutions in Europe and North America. Using vision language models, it explores how AI-assisted workflows help integrate contextual metadata, including site, estimated date ranges, artefact types. The presentation goes through opportunities and challenges of existing models trained on modern visual conventions that differ from historical image quality, aesthetic and stylistic composition. It observes how black-and-white historical footage with inconsistent framing and labels requires domain-specific approaches, and which solutions can be envisaged to preserve the richness of early audiovisual information.
Beyond cataloguing, the presentation examines how automated archival description affects and transforms cultural memory. Text matches and visual similarity now allow researchers to reconstruct early film sequences across archives and curate thematic collections that reframe and reposition our understanding of historical events. The paper reflects critically on the digitization of early footage and its entanglements with automation: which screen memories can machines unlock?
By sharing epistemological reflections on early documentary film culture, this presentation aims to contribute to broader conversations in the FIAT/IFTA community about the responsible integration of AI into archival workflows and the renewed relevance of historical film collections as forms of cultural mediation.

The Importance of Archives in Non-Fiction True Crime Series
The true crime genre has become one of the most widely consumed formats in contemporary audiovisual culture. From classic documentaries to series on digital platforms, one of its essential characteristics is the use of archival materials: police recordings, news footage, trial tapes, photographs, home videos, or excerpts from television programs. These elements are not merely visual resources; they form the foundation that provides credibility, depth, and legitimacy to criminal storytelling. I will talk about 

1. Archives as a guarantee of authenticity
2. Archives as a narrative tool
3. Archives and collective memory
4. Archives as a space of power and ethics
5. Archives as an instrument of public truth
6. The role of the archivist in non-fiction true crime series

The objective of this presentation is to reflect upon the state of digital preservation in Brazil within both the public and private sectors. This analysis is conducted through two case studies: Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) and Rede Globo. This work summarizes research compiled for an academic article currently in its final stages of preparation.
Established in 2007, EBC represents the unification of what is estimated to be nine public communication outlets, including TV Brasil. In addition to the television archives produced by the station itself, EBC inherited collections from defunct educational broadcasters: TVE Maranhão, founded in 1969, TVE Rio de Janeiro, created in 1975, and TV Nacional de Brasília, which was inaugurated in 1960. Over its nearly twenty-year history, the company has sought to adapt to technological innovations in the preservation of and access to television archives. Since 2015, EBC has utilized a Media Asset Management (MAM) platform, which enables the digital archiving of raw footage and television programs, as well as the viewing, downloading, and keyword-based searching of assets. This system is gradually replacing the legacy IAcervo platform, which primarily recorded media formats and metadata such as cataloging details, synopses, and production dates. In line with this modernization, the Archives and Research Department implemented a digitization project in 2019 for U-matic (KA) media. These tapes contain some of TVE Rio’s most significant programming, such as Sem Censura, No Mundo da Bola, and Edição Nacional.
Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcaster, was founded in 1965. Its documentation efforts began in 1974 in Rio de Janeiro, though the CEDOC (Documentation Center) department was not officially inaugurated until 1976. The collection is stored on a wide variety of media formats developed over the decades for audio and video storage, ranging from Quadruplex and U-matic tapes to contemporary LTO (Linear Tape-Open) technology. Content that was originally captured on magnetic tape is now captured digitally via binary code; however, this still necessitates storage solutions, whether physical media or virtual environments such as the cloud. Rede Globo has also undergone a significant evolution in its processes, progressing from paper-based cataloging stored in folders to sophisticated computerized systems. Initially, these systems were developed by in-house engineers; subsequently, the company entered into agreements with Dalet, and later Vizrt and DIVA, to outsource these services. Concurrent with this process is the digitization of analog media, generating digital assets that allow for a fully digital production workflow. This transition further facilitates the long-term conservation of original physical documents by reducing the need for repeated handling, as digital versions become the primary point of access. The purpose of this thirty-minute presentation is, therefore, to reflect on the Brazilian preservation landscape through a dialogue between these two distinct institutional experiences.

Between 1976 and 1980, the Radio and Television Department (SRTV) of the now-defunct Embrafilme - the state-owned company active in film production and distribution between 1969 and 1990 - produced, with the aim of promoting local cinema, two weekly programs, Cinemateca and Coisas Nossas, broadcast on TV Educativa in Rio de Janeiro, as well as medium-length documentaries designed for television. Cinemateca featured reports on the vibrant film activity in the country, especially in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together testimonies from filmmakers, actors, researchers, technicians, and audiences, along with behind-the-scenes footage and festival coverage. Coisas Nossas, in turn, was dedicated to the full screening of short films, accompanied by presentations and discussions.
The collection preserved by the Centro Técnico Audiovisual (CTAv) consists of 63 complete programs on U-matic tapes, as originally broadcast on television, in addition to film materials and audio tapes, including approximately 620 raw and leftover materials, mostly original 16mm reversal film stock with magnetic sound. The collection, which includes more than 3500 items, is currently being organized and cataloged by the CTAv team in partnership with the Audiovisual Historiography Research Group at Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF). The project has also resulted in the production of a documentary, currently in the editing phase.
CTAv began the process of digitizing the film materials in 2011. The content, gradually made available for free on CTAv’s social media platforms, has been used by researchers as well as documentary filmmakers, re-signifying and critically reexamining images created decades ago, when the relationship between the State and cinema in Brazil was radically different from that of the 21st century.

A significant portion of the collection managed by Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), a federal public broadcasting company, was produced before the company was established. The state-owned company was created by Law No. 11,652 of April 7, 2008, and all assets previously managed by the Roquette Pinto Educational Communication Association (Acerp) and Radiobrás were transferred to EBC. Although the transfer of assets was provided for by law, this was not sufficient to avoid questions regarding the ownership of this collection. In addition to the legal aspects, the lack of existing documentation on the audiovisual and radio works created challenges for management, particularly regarding licensing, access, and distribution.
The growing interest among audiovisual professionals, teachers, researchers, and students in the content produced over the course of 100 years of Brazilian public broadcasting history calls for solutions to existing challenges and strategic decision-making to enable access to and dissemination of this collection.
Accordingly, the purpose of this presentation is to share the experience of the Archive and Research Management Department (GARPE)—which oversees EBC’s collection—in addressing these challenges and the measures being taken to find solutions that ensure broader access, dissemination, and licensing, not only for students and professionals in the audiovisual industry but for society as a whole.

NHK preserves more than 10 million items of program and news footage, and many older materials lack sufficient metadata due to past production practices. Missing metadata makes it difficult to locate footage, verify rights, and identify elements that may be perceived as problematic today. This is a challenge faced by archives worldwide. NHK’s primary solution to this issue is the MCG (Multi-use Contents Group) Reuse Advisors, a specialized team that ensures safe and responsible reuse of archival footage.
The MCG Reuse Advisors conduct detailed reuse risk management, including rights investigation, tracing original production staff when records are incomplete, and reviewing whether footage may cause misunderstanding or discomfort from a contemporary perspective. When the original material is unsuitable, they recommend safer alternatives. In 2025, the team handled more than 1,500 inquiries, demonstrating its essential role in supporting production teams and maintaining responsible editorial practice.
In addition to this core workflow, NHK has recently introduced AI Metadata-less Search, a tool that allows users to retrieve visually relevant shots by typing simple words such as “cat,” “grilling meat,” or “airplane.” While this AI system is not the main focus of our proposal, it increasingly supports the MCG and producers by improving discoverability—especially for metadata-poor footage—and helping teams find potential alternatives more efficiently.
Although the MCG Reuse Advisors remain the central decision-makers, the combination of expert human judgment and new technical tools contributes to a more reliable and efficient reuse process. This presentation will focus on NHK’s MCG framework, share case examples, and briefly introduce how emerging tools like AI search can complement, but not replace, expert evaluation. Together, these efforts illustrate a practical model for responsible reuse in diverse archival environments. 

Many waves in technology development are stories of powerful entities becoming more powerful.  However, our work with audiovisual archives aims technology development along an alternative trajectory: rather than reinforcing the global monoculture, preserving the diversity of human experience and reducing the risk that less that less visible communities are absent from the historical record.


In this presentation, we describe work that follows this alternative trajectory to address such “archival absences". First, we introduce the CLAMS platform for computational processing of audiovisual archives. CLAMS is an open-source software designed to operate on modest, local hardware, permitting data sovereignty. With this computational context, we present two case studies from the collaboration between archivists at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and researchers at Brandeis University on using technology to repair archival absences.  


The first case study focuses on cataloging items in broadcast television archives, demonstrating a multi-stage AI processing pipeline used by archivists to surface lesser-known individuals who appeared in old broadcast television programs in order to enrich metadata and improve discoverability.


The second case study focuses on linguistic absence and diversity. While ASR systems such as Whisper yield high quality transcripts of speech in high-resource languages, these systems offer no benefit for the unsupported languages and even produce misleading and nonsensical outputs. We present ongoing work on language identification for multilingual broadcast content, focusing on indigenous languages such as Yupik and Samoan. This includes challenges in segmentation, annotation, and evaluation, as well as the design of annotation workflows in collaboration with community experts.
These case studies illustrate how computational tools, when designed in collaboration with archivists and communities, can support more inclusive and representative audiovisual archives.  We close the presentation with an invitation to consider other sources of archival absence that can be resisted through creative collaborations between archivists and AI.

In recent years, Brazil has witnessed a growing interest in sports films and documentaries based on archival footage, with productions such as 1995: No Tempo dos Bad Boys, Doutor Castor, A Mão do Eurico, Senna, Brasil 2002 and Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri. These works demonstrate not only the cultural appeal of sports memory, but also the central role played by audiovisual archives in shaping public narratives about national history, identity and collective imagination.

This proposal aims to present examples from the sports audiovisual collection of Fundação Padre Anchieta/TV Cultura, highlighting its relevance as a research and footage-licensing center for archival sports documentaries. As one of the pioneering institutions in Brazilian television broadcasting and sports roundtable programming, TV Cultura holds a rich and diverse collection, including materials produced by the broadcaster itself as well as records originating from other television channels and institutions.

The project also addresses a crucial challenge in audiovisual preservation: the safeguarding, restoration and digitization of materials whose copyrights belong to other entities, but which may no longer be preserved, accessible or even extant in the collections of their original rights holders. This is particularly relevant in the case of footage from broadcasters such as TV Manchete and TV Tupi, as well as institutions affected by major archival losses, including fires. By discussing access, reuse and responsibility, this proposal argues that the preservation of sports audiovisual archives is essential not only for institutional memory, but also for the circulation, reinterpretation and survival of Brazilian sports memory.

During the 2025 Club World Cup, Globo’s Archive department, in partnership with the Sports Editorial team, conducted a proof of concept (PoC) using Google Vision Warehouse to explore new possibilities for content discovery and usage in live production environments.
 
The initiative focused on evaluating how artificial intelligence can transform the way content is retrieved and utilized in sports journalism and live broadcasting.
 
By leveraging automated video processing, the solution was able to interpret specific contexts and situations within the footage. This enabled a shift from traditional keyword-based searches to a contextual approach, significantly expanding the scope of content discovery.
 
In practice, the Sports team gained the ability to access content through contextual queries—such as specific game situations, crowd behavior, or visual elements—even when this information had not been previously indexed in the metadata. This new model increased the speed of content retrieval, added depth to editorial coverage, and enabled the discovery of previously underutilized assets.
 
The PoC demonstrated the strategic potential of AI within the Archive, making content more accessible, reusable, and relevant across diverse editorial contexts.

The presentation will be about how we gain the trust of the filmmakers and their subjects, about finding new collaborations and how this method is a gateway for us into communities that were hard to reach.


As the main example the presentation will be about Boy from the Dessa, a documentary series about Indonesian born musician Rudy Lentze, who came to the Netherlands as a baby. Rudy Lentze's personal history takes the viewer through major social and historical developments, including the colonial history of the Dutch East Indies, immigration, and the challenges of building a life from a complex migration background. Rudy's idiosyncrasy is rooted in the fascinating life story of a man born in Indonesia to an "Indo" father (with German roots) and a Sundanese mother, who was raised in the Netherlands. He grew up in a disrupted family caught between clashing cultures and nearly succumbed to it all — depression, anxiety, drug use, and alcohol. Still, like a classic (anti-)hero, Rudy managed to largely overcome his troubled youth and personal problems. Music was his salvation. 


This documentary is a collaboration between the filmmakers and the Archive. From the start we endorsed the making of this film, helping with finding and digitising the archive material, and in return we acquired the rich Lentze family archive, one of the few family archives of an Indonesian family. Including a lot of film- and videoreels, and audiotapes. This is part of an ongoing collaboration with filmmakers from Greater Groningen, mainly, but not exclusively through our themed website www.poparchiefgroningen.nl (the Groningen Poparchive). We help the artists, they add to our archive. With doing so we reach a different audience and we diversify our collection in an organic way. We have more than 30 'Rockumentaries' online, and with Boy from the Dessa as the latest feature, the archive is firmly rooted in that part of society. Regional stories, embedded in the national history.


The documentary series will be made available afterwards for all participants of the World Conference.

Although local community experiences of the struggle leading up to democracy in South Africa are well documented, there is limited research on retrospective reflections regarding that time in the post-apartheid era. This study explores a body of audiovisual archives created by members of a local community in a 2024 art-creation event at the National Archives of South Africa. These depict experiences and memories of local people as they looked back on the struggle and are preserved in the archive’s collection.  The analysis of the audiovisual archives contextualises local community experiences as part of the attempt to construct their hitherto under-represented post-apartheid narrative for the purpose of historical continuity. It showcases the outcome of an active people-centred method to encourage and facilitate the creation of audiovisual archives in reclaiming cultural heritage as a tool of community engagement, resilience and resistance. This investigation reveals how community experience can generate audiovisual archives reconstruction of past experiences and memory and potentially lead to future healing.  

Since 2023, a team of researchers, technicians, and fellows has been developing a project titled “Audiovisual, History and Preservation: The Place of Brazilian Newsreels and Television Reports in the Construction of Memory (1946–1974)”, coordinated by Eduardo Victorio Morettin (ECA-USP) and funded by FAPESP (grant no. 2022/06032-0).
The project examines, in the context of Brazil’s democratic period and the civil-military dictatorship, representations of historical events and social groups, as well as the cultural and political imaginaries and discourses conveyed in television reports broadcast by TV Tupi - the country’s first television network (1950 - 1980), whose archive was incorporated into the Brazilian Cinematheque in 1987.
This presentation focuses on processes of audiovisual cataloguing, preservation, and expanded access to these materials, highlighting their transdisciplinary nature. The TV Tupi Collection comprises approximately 180,000 16mm reels (around 8,800 cases), in addition to a substantial set of scripts for national and international news narration. It is estimated that about 150,000 of these materials date from the 1950s to 1974, forming the core corpus of the project.
This work emphasizes the articulation between historical research, critical analysis, and laboratory practices in audiovisual preservation. By engaging with a largely unseen and still underexplored corpus, the project contributes to the recognition and circulation of a significant portion of Brazil’s audiovisual memory, expanding possibilities for research on the country’s history, politics, and culture.

The panel proposes a reflection on preservation and access to films made by women in Brazil, focusing on short films. Nayla Guerra presents a survey of a filmography she compiled, comprising 222 short films directed by 121 women during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and analyzes the importance and challenges involved in recovering these works. Often regarded as a format of less cultural, social, and historical importance, short films tend to receive less attention and are frequently overlooked when decisions are made regarding preservation, restoration, and access initiatives. Many of these works are lost, damaged, or available only in analog formats, making access to shorts made by women during this period particularly difficult.
Next, Carolina Vergotti presents a study on the preservation of these 222 shorts, including the conditions of the films in the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection, analyzed using the methodologies adopted by the institution. The diagnostic aims to demonstrate the gaps in the collection, the risks faced by some of these films, as well as possible paths for the preservation and access to these works for restoration, research, and diffusion.
Finally, Patrícia Machado introduces a recent initiative she has been leading for the digitization and expanded access to these works. She presents a platform created by her project that provides what she calls the “biographies of films”, making information about the production contexts of these films, how they circulated, which archives hold them, and their preservation conditions accessible. The project also involves digital preservation and access to films that remain forgotten or are undergoing deterioration.
By combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the panel aims to draw attention to the gaps in the representation of women within archival collections and to present possible actions for recovering these works and, consequently, the contributions of women to the history of cinema.

In the UK, Black homemovies have been historically under-collected and under-valued as a result of years of systemic and interpersonal racism. Distributed at the hands of those deciding what is of importance to collect, preserve and who they want to represent their country. Additionally, homemovies that are categorised to represent Black life in Britain are often through the gaze and context of the onlooker, leading to inaccurate, dangerous and racist storytelling and cataloguing. 


In response, ‘Undocumented’ sought to address these historical absences and inaccuracies. The first year of the project focused on building trust amongst the black community, introducing audiences to archives as a source of learning and inspiration but also making them aware of the gaps within them. This year was a vital foundation of uplifting the Black people as custodians of their own legacies and informing them that their homemovies are in desperate need of preservation. The second year focused on training 40 Black Screen Heritage Ambassadors, building confidence, skills, and trust in the archive sector, and supporting participants to digitise and preserve a selection of material. The 3rd year marks a significant step change: moving from training and initial collecting, into sustained ambassador activity and sector-facing leadership. 


In this presentation, we will discuss the results, learnings and challenges of this framework as a tool for other producers and researchers to utilise in response to gaps within archives and film history. Alongside this we will explain the conception of the programme, themes found in donated footage and key takeaways from participants regarding how this programme has developed them as Ambassadors of archive materials. We will also screen a trailer of the short-film ‘Custodians’ created by a programme participant Monalisa Chukwuma, which is a photographic and cinematic exploration of Black archival labour, community memory, and care. 

Founded in 1971, the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken preserves one of Argentina's most significant audiovisual collections. Its holdings include over 90,000 film reels, from early nitrate film to contemporary productions, among them major collections such as the Sucesos Argentinos newsreel archive and the Canal 9 television news collection; more than 50,000 photographs; and thousands of posters, sketches, costumes, scripts, production documents, and cinematographic equipment. Hundreds of thousands of items across a wide range of formats and typologies.


For more than five decades, the museum's staff have documented the collection through paper-based inventories and, later, dozens of carefully maintained spreadsheets. Over the same period, successive municipal and international initiatives introduced centralized cataloging platforms, from city-wide databases to UNESCO-backed systems like WinISIS, but each was either discontinued or left without ongoing support. The museum's own records outlived them all, yet no single system ever tied the information together.


This presentation traces how the museum reconciled and migrated decades of accumulated data into an integrated open-source collection management system and public digital catalog, bridging independently managed film, photographic, archival, and object collections in a single platform. It includes a live demonstration of the result.


Drawing on this experience, we discuss what it takes to build sustainable digital collections infrastructure in contexts where continuity cannot be taken for granted. We share what we learned about legacy data reconciliation, open-source adoption, and the concrete role of international cooperation.