FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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).