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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.