FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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. 

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.

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.

This presentation will reflect on the full trajectory from data preparation to public launch, culminating in the go-live of the Treasury Chamber mid 2026. We will share initial user responses and usage patterns, examining whether they aligned with expectations formed during development or revealed unforeseen behaviors and needs. In doing so, we aim to provide insight into how large-scale data transformation, ethical decision-making, and real-world user engagement intersect in the creation of a cultural heritage platform.
2 years ago in Bucharest, Sound & Vision presented its preparations for the mass-scale publication of audiovisual collections, supported in part by the EU Copyright Directive and its provisions for making out-of-commerce works accessible online. At that stage, the focus lay primarily on large-scale data processing: analyzing metadata quality, streamlining rights information, and implementing workflows to support sustainable data management and clearance activities.
In the past years, this preparatory work evolved into a series of concrete decisions about how data should be transformed, enriched, and ultimately presented to end users. This included choices about metadata normalization, contextual enrichment, and the balance between completeness and usability in the user interface. Particular attention was paid to how archival data—often complex, inconsistent, or incomplete—could be made accessible and meaningful without oversimplifying its context.
Alongside these technical and design considerations, ethical questions played a role. Decisions had to be made about what material could and should be published online, how to handle sensitive or potentially problematic content, and how to responsibly represent historical records in a public-facing environment. These considerations influenced not only rights clearance workflows but also data presentation strategies and access conditions within the platform.
To support collaboration between Sound & Vision and its external development partner, user archetypes were used to align discussions around user needs and expectations. However, also a very driver of development remained the data itself: its structure, limitations, and potential for reuse.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

TVN holds one of the most significant archives in Latin America, preserving the social, political, and cultural heritage of our country through audiovisual records of incalculable value. This archive represents an emblematic case of the destruction of a large part of its collection following the Military Coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. Over the years, it has been recovered and is recognized today for the preserved content that has largely allowed us to reclaim our history as a society and a nation during those years.


Television material (news and programs) kept in the TVN Audiovisual Archive and produced during the Popular Unity government (Salvador Allende) was ordered to be eliminated—including the footage of Pablo Neruda receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. However, with a sense of historical protection, these materials were hidden for years until Chile returned to democracy. Their preservation was a risky method during years dominated by institutional violence and uncertainty. Today, we can feel proud and fulfilled in our duty as "guardians of history and memory," because this content has been a fundamental pillar for countless historical recovery programs. These programs have allowed us to recognize ourselves as Chileans, to know who we were and what our society was like before the Military Dictatorship—how cities, inhabitants, urban tribes, and music have changed.


During difficult times, one way to protect the archive content marked for elimination was to remove the cards from the manual catalog that detailed the material. We created minimal descriptions of images documenting protests against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in the 1980s. The cataloging systems for this new material were insufficient, or their context had been lost. It was a slow and costly task, making it difficult to reconstruct the moments they were recorded. We had to conduct extensive research to re-catalog this material, searching through newspapers and frequently consulting the memory of journalists for accurate descriptions. It was only then—at a time when it was finally possible to speak of human rights, political violence, or detained-disappeared persons—that we truly grasped the importance of having preserved those images. This process was necessary to establish how events unfolded in accordance with history.
The digitization process of this Archive began in 2010 with a planned ingestion project tailored to our needs and our commitment to the social role of the archive, which is part of the Audiovisual Heritage of TVN, Chile's public television.
It is important to highlight the work of librarians and journalists in re-cataloging content from those dictatorial times, when language was tightly controlled, and beginning to use a new language that accurately described what the images showed regarding Human Rights, violence, repression, and detained-disappeared persons.
With the help of digitization, we have set the fundamental task of increasing data collection to improve user-centered planning for this archive. We continue to move forward with the ingestion of historical content, solving daily the challenges posed by such old materials and formats that are increasingly difficult to rescue, but which contain valuable content reflecting the lives of Chileans during a specific era.


The commitment the Archive assumes toward history and the collective memory of a country is remarkable: without archives, there is no memory, and when we speak of memory, we are speaking of preservation.


Our mission as the Archive of Chilean Public Television is to preserve the audiovisual heritage that belongs to all Chileans. It is within this mission that we have focused our work to fulfill the challenge and dream of making the content archived and preserved for over 55 years available to all of Chilean society.


Finally, I believe that a great "vision for the future" will mark our path as archivists, allowing us to fulfill our mission of preserving images as a reflection of our society's history, ensuring that through them, memory can reconstruct the life lived.

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.

As Ireland’s national public service media organisation, RTÉ holds a vast, irreplaceable repository of the state’s audiovisual heritage. However, the transition from physical carriers to a resilient digital future presents a challenge. This presentation examines RTÉ’s large-scale migration and digital preservation odyssey - a programme that balances the weight of historical stewardship with the realities of modern fiscal and technological constraints. We analyse the answers to key questions for this programme of projects, such as:

• How did we migrate different archive collections? i.e., how were resourcing challenges tackled and how did we decide on in-house versus outsourced aspects of migration?
• How did we restructure the archive department to accommodate the resourcing of the large-scale projects running in parallel to business as usual?
• How did RTÉ Technology approach this challenge, and what was the modern, resilient, and most cost-effective technology solution deployed to accommodate this mass migration and provide long-term digital access to audiovisual archive content?
• How did we introduce digital preservation principles, and what remains to be done in this area?

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.

This presentation proposes a case study of data.ina.fr, a public platform developed by INA to unlock the potential of audiovisual archives by transforming them into long-term, interpretable data about media coverage in France. Rather than focusing on individual archive items or editorial reuse, data.ina.fr introduces a new paradigm: archives as a source of structured evidence that allows society to observe, compare, and understand media narratives over time. 
The platform analyses nearly two million hours of television and radio broadcasts from twenty French channels over a ten-year period (2015–2026). Through a set of interactive visualisations, it enables users to explore how current affairs are treated by media : which personalities dominate media attention, how territories are represented, how language evolves, and how gender balance in airtime varies across channels and years. This long-term, quantitative perspective put the spotlight on trends that are impossible to grasp through manual consultation of archives alone. 
data.ina.fr is grounded in two founding principles. First, to give meaning to archival collections beyond the archive object itself, by extracting indicators that allow comparison, verification, and contextualisation. Second, to create a tool for the objectivation of information over time, capable of supporting journalism, research, education, and public debate. In this sense, the project positions archives not only as heritage, but as a living public resource. 
This approach has made data.ina.fr a reference tool for professionals. Journalists from major national media regularly use the platform to support investigations, contextualise breaking news, and produce data-driven storytelling grounded in archival evidence. It is also integrated into journalism education, where it serves as a practical resource for teaching investigative methods based on quantitative analysis of media content. Beyond journalism, researchers in linguistics, political science, marketing, and public policy use the platform to analyse media representations and agenda-setting dynamics. 
Internally, data.ina.fr has transformed INA’s own editorial practices. Journalists rely on it to investigate issues such as gender-based violence, foreign interference campaigns, disinformation strategies, or media concentration. Monthly publications such as the data.ina.fr News Barometer provide recurring indicators on parity, territorial coverage, and dominant narratives, reinforcing INA’s role as a trusted public media actor capable of objectifying the media treatment of current affairs. 

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.