FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Audiovisual archives are increasingly confronted with ethical, social, and technical challenges when documenting traumatic, community-based and/or marginalised histories. This two‑hour participatory workshop explores how archive services can engage responsibly with these sensitive materials while fostering more inclusive and community‑centred practices.
Designed as a World Café, the session invites participants to rotate across thematic tables, each guided by an expert moderator and introduced by a short case study highlighting key dilemma and approach.
Examples will frame the collective discussion and encourage participants to reflect on the diversity of archival contexts and methodologies. Together, participants will identify concrete actions linked to three essential dimensions:

1. Publics and mediation: strategies for contextualising sensitive materials, involving communities in shaping narratives, and supporting inclusive authorship of shared histories.
2. Witnesses and co‑creation: ethical engagement with contributors and survivors, including methods for their protection and empowerment, and collaborative production of archival content.
3. Collections and archival practice: improving discoverability of sensitive collections, addressing descriptive biases, and examining both the potential and risks of AI in the management of marginalised archives.

Bringing together contributors from varied regions, institutional traditions, and professional backgrounds, from national heritage institutions to grassroots archival initiatives, the workshop aims to foster a plural, global, and practice‑oriented exchange.
A final plenary will synthesise insights from all tables and outline a shared set of recommendations to support more ethical, inclusive, and community‑centred approaches within audiovisual memory institutions.

Many waves in technology development are stories of powerful entities becoming more powerful.  However, our work with audiovisual archives aims technology development along an alternative trajectory: rather than reinforcing the global monoculture, preserving the diversity of human experience and reducing the risk that less that less visible communities are absent from the historical record.


In this presentation, we describe work that follows this alternative trajectory to address such “archival absences". First, we introduce the CLAMS platform for computational processing of audiovisual archives. CLAMS is an open-source software designed to operate on modest, local hardware, permitting data sovereignty. With this computational context, we present two case studies from the collaboration between archivists at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and researchers at Brandeis University on using technology to repair archival absences.  


The first case study focuses on cataloging items in broadcast television archives, demonstrating a multi-stage AI processing pipeline used by archivists to surface lesser-known individuals who appeared in old broadcast television programs in order to enrich metadata and improve discoverability.


The second case study focuses on linguistic absence and diversity. While ASR systems such as Whisper yield high quality transcripts of speech in high-resource languages, these systems offer no benefit for the unsupported languages and even produce misleading and nonsensical outputs. We present ongoing work on language identification for multilingual broadcast content, focusing on indigenous languages such as Yupik and Samoan. This includes challenges in segmentation, annotation, and evaluation, as well as the design of annotation workflows in collaboration with community experts.
These case studies illustrate how computational tools, when designed in collaboration with archivists and communities, can support more inclusive and representative audiovisual archives.  We close the presentation with an invitation to consider other sources of archival absence that can be resisted through creative collaborations between archivists and AI.

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.
 

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.

The panel proposes a reflection on preservation and access to films made by women in Brazil, focusing on short films. Nayla Guerra presents a survey of a filmography she compiled, comprising 222 short films directed by 121 women during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and analyzes the importance and challenges involved in recovering these works. Often regarded as a format of less cultural, social, and historical importance, short films tend to receive less attention and are frequently overlooked when decisions are made regarding preservation, restoration, and access initiatives. Many of these works are lost, damaged, or available only in analog formats, making access to shorts made by women during this period particularly difficult.
Next, Carolina Vergotti presents a study on the preservation of these 222 shorts, including the conditions of the films in the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection, analyzed using the methodologies adopted by the institution. The diagnostic aims to demonstrate the gaps in the collection, the risks faced by some of these films, as well as possible paths for the preservation and access to these works for restoration, research, and diffusion.
Finally, Patrícia Machado introduces a recent initiative she has been leading for the digitization and expanded access to these works. She presents a platform created by her project that provides what she calls the “biographies of films”, making information about the production contexts of these films, how they circulated, which archives hold them, and their preservation conditions accessible. The project also involves digital preservation and access to films that remain forgotten or are undergoing deterioration.
By combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the panel aims to draw attention to the gaps in the representation of women within archival collections and to present possible actions for recovering these works and, consequently, the contributions of women to the history of cinema.