FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

This session proposes a joint field-based presentation by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA, France) and the Cinemateca Brasileira, drawing on the project Crossed Perspectives France–Brazil, developed within the framework of the France–Brazil Cultural Season 2025.
The project addresses a central question for audiovisual archives worldwide: how to preserve, document, restore and provide access to audiovisual collections related to Indigenous peoples, in contexts shaped by historical asymmetries, political sensitivities and ethical responsibilities, while engaging respectfully with the communities concerned.
Based on audiovisual collections held in France and Brazil, largely produced through external viewpoints, the project initiated a process of critical reassessment of collections, re-documentation and international cooperation, in dialogue with Brazilian professionals and representatives of Indigenous communities, notably the Xokó people.
Audiovisual archives relating to Indigenous peoples are highly sensitive heritage materials, both invaluable and complex to work with. They raise intertwined challenges:

• historical North–South imbalances in the production and custody of images;
• ethical issues related to rights, consent and contemporary uses;
• documentary gaps and inadequate metadata;
• growing expectations regarding access, restitution and cultural reappropriation.

 
In this context, cooperation between a European public audiovisual archive and a major Latin American cinematheque offers a concrete opportunity to experiment with operational frameworks based on trust, mediation and co-construction. 
In this context, the presentation will consist in drawing hypothesis to the following questions :  

• How can audiovisual archives responsibly work with collections related to Indigenous peoples that were historically produced through external or unequal viewpoints?
• In what ways can ethical considerations (rights, consent, cultural sensitivity) be embedded directly into archival, technical and editorial workflows?
• What role can national institutions and international cooperation play in enabling dialogue, shared governance and sustainable decision‑making?
• Which practices developed through this France–Brazil experience are transferable to other archival contexts dealing with sensitive or marginalised memories?

The Cinemateca Brasileira: reference institution and national mediator
The Cinemateca Brasileira plays a key role in anchoring the project locally, combining archival expertise, in-depth knowledge of Brazilian legal and cultural contexts, and active dialogue with professionals and communities. It contributes to defining cooperation frameworks that are attentive to Indigenous sensitivities and national institutional realities.
INA: trusted third party and methodological facilitator
INA acts as a trusted third party, providing methodological tools for documentation, analysis and governance, while supporting the critical reassessment of collections produced outside Brazil.
 

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become an important tool in contemporary film restoration. Machine learning systems now assist with chroma reconstruction, density balancing, spatial inference, defect detection, and reference-guided restoration. Despite these advances, current AI methods still encounter significant limitations when dealing with the physical and statistical characteristics of photochemical film and scanned archival materials. This presentation examines the principal technical boundaries of present-day AI restoration systems and identifies the research directions most likely to overcome them. The first major limitation is the loss of high-frequency information: many generative models operate in compressed latent representations that suppress stochastic micro-signal, producing over-smoothed textures and synthetic noise patterns. The second limitation is temporal consistency: motion picture restoration requires stable behaviour of fine detail across frames, yet current systems often produce flickering textures and motion-dependent smoothing. The third limitation concerns acquisition-specific signal characteristics: film stock response curves, dye fading behaviour, scanner optics, and laboratory processing artifacts vary enormously across archival materials. The presentation then examines emerging approaches that may address these limitations. Pixel-space diffusion offers improved microstructure reconstruction but at extreme computational cost. Wavelet-based diffusion frameworks reorganise image information into frequency bands while preserving spatial localisation. Grain transport - treating film grain not as noise to be removed but as a structured stochastic signal to be probabilistically preserved - represents a further frontier. Drawing on the presenter's ongoing experimental work in machine-learning-assisted film restoration, the presentation argues that the most promising path forward lies in hybrid workflows that combine machine learning inference, classical frequency-domain processing, stochastic grain modelling, and expert human supervision.

The Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará (MIS CE) was established with the mission of preserving and promoting the state’s audiovisual heritage. Today, its collection is estimated at around 160,000 items, including part of the archive of Educational Television (TVE). Founded in 1974, TVE was created to produce educational content for the Ceará State Secretariat of Culture and Education through a tele-education system.
When the museum was founded in 1980, part of the TVE collection was incorporated into its holdings. This material includes records, 16 mm film reels, and slides. As one of the earliest collections within MIS CE, it was affected over time by relocations and interruptions in preservation processes.
In 2022, the museum was reopened and expanded with a new annex building. This facility includes updated storage areas as well as preservation and digitization laboratories. With new technologies, such as a film scanner, the museum has significantly enhanced its ability to process and share its collections, particularly the TVE archive. A recent assessment helped identify losses that occurred during past relocations and determine how much of the collection still requires digitization.
During the digitization process, numerous materials of historical, cultural, and political significance to the state were identified. This collection reinforces the role of television archives in shaping identity, as it reveals transformations within communities and traces the development of regional social values.
In this context, the history of audiovisual production and television in Ceará - home to the third television station established in the region -, can now be revisited through previously inaccessible sources. It also opens new avenues for research into these materials, contributing to a broader understanding of television history in Brazil.

In the global archival sector, "co-design" is frequently discussed but rarely interrogated as a force for institutional change. For the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), the journey toward a First Nations-led collaborative model began with a profound challenge: the preservation and repatriation of the Strehlow Collection. Containing highly sensitive, men’s-only sacred ceremonies recorded in Central Australia between 1932 and 1975, the collection’s preservation was a technical necessity but a cultural challenge.


This paper argues that the Strehlow project served as the pivotal milestone that transformed the NFSA’s own professional practice. By moving beyond the traditional model of "custodianship," the NFSA worked with the Traditional Owners to build a truly collaborative framework to appropriately preserve, digitise and repatriate the material on Country. Embedded in the process was deep respect and observation of cultural protocols, governed by a dedicated Men’s Working Group. The work was centred around strict, community-guided cultural protocols, and culminated in the deployment of a "Digital Access Studio" in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) to ensure on-Country control.


Critically, this model has not remained static. Drawing on the FIAT/IFTA theme of mutual learning, the NFSA iteratively evolved its approach—from the early lessons of the Strehlow project to further collaborations with First Nations communities across Australia. This includes a multi-year project to digitise and repatriate the archive of the Torres Strait Islander Media Association – a collection that holds decades of audiovisual material of significance to communities across the Torres Strait.


By analysing this evolution, the paper demonstrates how audiovisual archives can become true spaces of exchange, where institutional technical expertise and ancient cultural authority meet to create a more ethical, resilient, and collaborative archival future.

Digital technologies have been revolutionizing audiovisual production, providing benefits in image and sound capture, mastering, and editing. The transition from analogue carriers to digital systems impacts operational costs and, crucially, long-term access. In an increasingly digital world, the dual pressure of born-digital production and the migration of analogue collections for dissemination and physical media conservation is intensifying the demand for digital preservation strategies. Given the challenges and complexity of digital preservation, the present study proposes a maturity diagnostic of the Centro Técnico Audiovisual (CTAv) through a hybrid methodological approach. It employs the DPC Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) to evaluate organizational and service capabilities, in conjunction with the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation, focusing on the technical integrity and storage control of audiovisual assets, supplemented by field interviews with CTAv’s staff to evaluate the organisational and technological infrastructure, as well as the sustainable resources framework. The objective is to identify and analyse the principal challenges to the implementation of a sustainable digital preservation strategy within the CTAv, a public institution under the Secretariat of Audiovisual of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture that holds a significant national collection comprising over 24,000 items, including news reports, short films, documentaries, and animations. It constitutes an audiovisual heritage of high historical, documentary, and artistic value to Brazil. As the CTAv collections are immersed in the digital era of constant change, establishing a sustainable digital preservation framework is essential to safeguarding this heritage, ensuring it remains accessible for future generations.

This communication aims to present the first audiovisual preservation efforts at the State University of Goiás, starting with the creation of the University Laboratory of Audiovisual Memory (LUMINAV), the first in the Brazilian Midwest dedicated to this purpose in a public university. In less than a year of existence, LUMINAV has already managed to digitize and catalog the entire collection of the UEG Cinema and Audiovisual Course (more than 500 short productions in 20 years), in addition to having received more than 1500 items in two collections of inestimable value to 
the culture of Goiás: the Caravídeo collection - containing records of traditional communities, cultural events and social movements active in the state in the early 2000s - and the collection donated by anthropologist Telma Camargo, with accounts from people affected by the Cesium-137 disaster in Goiânia.
This paper also presents the challenges for LUMINAV's permanent and sustainable work in preserving audiovisual memory in Goiás, a territory where public policies for audiovisual media prioritize production and exhibition events, without concern for sound and image heritage accompanying these funding opportunities. Through documentary analysis of the laws that guarantee public funding opportunities for culture in Goiás over the last 10 years (2016-2026), we seek to outline a panorama of public policies for audiovisual media in the state, as well as to point out ways in which audiovisual preservation is considered not through isolated proposals, but as a category eligible for permanent resource allocation.

LUPA-UFF is a university lab created in 2017 and dedicated to orphan films from the State of Rio de Janeiro (Freire, 2020). Within its collection, which consists mostly of home movies, the Esdras Baptista collection stands out as one of the most important with more than 1,000 film reels. Esdras Baptista's collection includes 16mm footage he shot while responsible for television coverage of the Rio de Janeiro government (until 1960) and the state of Guanabara (after 1960, when Brasília became the capital and Rio de Janeiro a city-state).
Although assembled by a cameraman who was a government employee (so, a personal collection), and not by a broadcast company or the government itself, the Esdras' collection of 16mm black and white reversal silent films, in its essence, does not differ from other Brazilian TV film collections from the 1960s. What sets it apart is the fact that the Esdras' collection has been preserved, digitized, and disseminated by a regional university archive such as LUPA, which represents a unique case in Brazil.
In addition to presenting this collection, the objective of this presentation is to discuss the practices of access and dissemination of the Esdras Baptista collection by LUPA-UFF, including its reuse and reinterpretation,through collaboration between students, professionals, and professors, within the scope of the undergraduate degree in Cinema and Audiovisual and the postgraduate program in Cinema at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). This collection of 16mm films, originally produced for television, has become an important tool for teaching and research in the history of Brazil and, in particular, Rio de Janeiro. In addition, the Esdras Baptista collection at LUPA-UFF provides the possibility of access to and dissemination of television archives, which often face obstacles due to the lack of public policies for television audiovisual preservation and the policies of commercial companies (Tillmann, 2021).

This presentation discusses ways in which Canada's public broadcaster is working to mobilize its vast archival legacy to support its reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. From the digitization of archival radio shows that aired in Indigenous languages, to analyzing historical coverage for its portrayals of Indigenous stories, CBC/Radio-Canada is advancing along its reconciliation journey by surfacing the truths embedded in its audiovisual past, in collaboration with Indigenous researchers and communities.

The project aims to rescue and to put into value the oldest surviving sound newsreels in Chile. Because they are in 35mm nitrate film, they are inaccessible to the public due to the lack of other film or digital copies. To achieve these objectives, the project includes the following stages: cleaning and physical restoration, 4K digitization, detailed cataloging, backup on LTO-9 tapes, and online publication via the Chilean National Film Archive's platform. These actions will allow for the registration, inventorying, and documentation of a valuable historical heritage collection, ensuring its long-term preservation and future availability for public use.


The collection of sound newsreels produced by the state-owned company Chile Films between 1944 and 1949 constitutes a valuable social, economic, and cultural record of Chile in the 1940s. These images and sounds are practically unknown to current generations, making their rescue, enhancement, and preservation essential for Chileans (and the world at large) to discover and to enjoy them. Because they were filmed nearly 80 years ago, the original film stock is now very fragile (nitrate film can spontaneously combust and, over time, becomes cloudy, making recovery impossible). Therefore, their digitization and transfer to more stable formats that allow for their preservation and dissemination are urgently needed.