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. 

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.

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.

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.  

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.