FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Cinemateca da Quebrada is a community-based audiovisual archive created in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, as a response to the historical erasure and misrepresentation of working-class and peripheral communities within official media archives.
The project focuses on collecting, digitising and activating films produced inside these territories, many of which have circulated through informal networks such as pirate DVD stands, independent productions and grassroots audiovisual initiatives. These images, often excluded from institutional preservation, constitute a vital part of contemporary audiovisual memory.
Rather than functioning as a traditional archive, Cinemateca da Quebrada operates as a living and collective platform. Through cineclubs, public screenings and educational actions, the archive is constantly reactivated in dialogue with the communities from which it emerges. In this sense, preservation is inseparable from circulation, and memory is understood as a dynamic and shared process.
The project also engages in transnational collaborations, notably with the Cinemathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde, fostering exchanges between peripheral territories in Brazil and France. These dialogues expand the understanding of audiovisual memory beyond national frameworks, highlighting common experiences of inequality, migration and resistance.
This proposal reflects on the challenges of building an archive from the margins: how to preserve without institutional support, how to legitimise informal images, and how to construct memory as a tool for political agency. By sharing this experience, the project contributes to rethinking archival practices in more inclusive, decentralised and community-driven ways.

This presentation would be a review of a season delivered at the BFI entitled, Constructed, Told, Spoken: A counter history of Britain on TV, which retraced the establishment of Multicultural TV Units at the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, in March 2026. My season told a chronological story of how this unique British phenomenon in television programming came to be, defining this timeline as a movement in television non-fiction. 


In this presentation, I intend to tell the story of the emergence of multicultural programming, illustrate how the season brought together a range of voices, and shed light on the conditions for establishing these units and the programming they provided for minorities in Britain. I will detail the archives I worked across and trace the emergence as it unfolded throughout the season.


The timeline is as follows: it began with the emergence of the BBC's immigrant programmes unit in the 1960's. Followed by a period of institutional absence for multicultural policy, during which anti-racist television was developed externally by activists and found a place on our screens through open-access slots in the 1970s. By the 1980s, a defined institutional lane had begun to emerge, peaking in the middle years with a clearly articulated political and social positioning grounded in community perspectives coached in this institutional voice. Ultimately, the season traced the movement's progression toward its eventual decline and the phasing out of multicultural units in the early 2000s.


My presentation will show the programmes and the development of this political and social position, as mirroring diversity in Britain, how it functioned as a counter-narrative to the news and how its preservation and rediscovery through the archive reframes this period.