FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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 reflects on how a practical archival task inside a Uruguayan television broadcaster evolved, over sixteen years, into a knowledge-driven system for managing, contextualising and reusing audiovisual memory.
The project began in 2010, when I was assigned the recovery of a historical television archive using only handwritten paper notebooks as the primary access tool. At the same time, much of the collection still existed on ageing analogue and early digital videotape formats (1-Inch Tape, U-Matic). To make the material accessible, I had to learn through experimentation how to clean, restore and digitise playback machines that were already several decades old.
Coming from a generation that experienced both analogue video culture and the first stages of digital editing, I combined broadcast operational knowledge with self-taught experimentation. Early attempts using Word documents and spreadsheets quickly proved insufficient for the speed and precision required in daily television production. This operational pressure led me to begin learning programming and databases in order to recreate the logic of the paper workflow in digital form: locating content quickly, identifying the correct tape, and later the precise timecode inside the material, find actors etc.
As newsroom demands increased, the system evolved continuously through real-world use, driven by requests from colleagues who relied on rapid access to historical footage. Even after the archive department was closed in 2020, the project continued independently, incorporating long-term preservation logic, production workflows, contextual metadata, artificial intelligence support and large-scale efficiency testing using a personal dataset of more than one million media assets collected over years of archival practice.
This case study explores how necessity, situated learning and broadcast reality can generate technological innovation from within archival work itself.
That's my story.

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. 

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.