FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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.

As Ireland’s national public service media organisation, RTÉ holds a vast, irreplaceable repository of the state’s audiovisual heritage. However, the transition from physical carriers to a resilient digital future presents a challenge. This presentation examines RTÉ’s large-scale migration and digital preservation odyssey - a programme that balances the weight of historical stewardship with the realities of modern fiscal and technological constraints. We analyse the answers to key questions for this programme of projects, such as:

• How did we migrate different archive collections? i.e., how were resourcing challenges tackled and how did we decide on in-house versus outsourced aspects of migration?
• How did we restructure the archive department to accommodate the resourcing of the large-scale projects running in parallel to business as usual?
• How did RTÉ Technology approach this challenge, and what was the modern, resilient, and most cost-effective technology solution deployed to accommodate this mass migration and provide long-term digital access to audiovisual archive content?
• How did we introduce digital preservation principles, and what remains to be done in this area?

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.

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).

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.

This proposal explores the consonance between the Social Technology of Memory (TSM) and the Design Method for Project and Resignification of Museum Spaces (MDPREM) as decolonial tools for audiovisual heritage management. The research investigates the Brazilian territory of Serra Pelada, a former gold mining camp historically stigmatized by extreme industrial extractivism. Instead of traditional top-down archiving, this approach transfers curatorial autonomy to marginalized communities, specifically focusing on former miners and local residents. By integrating TSM's active listening with MDPREM's pillars, the methodology transforms silenced narratives into active instruments of narrative justice. Ultimately, the project demonstrates how emotional design and social museology can redefine community-based archives as spaces of equity and dialogue. In Serra Pelada, the methodology guided the rescue, cataloging, and digitization of 417 historical audiovisual media from a local filmmaker, empowering 17 residents as "Guardians of Memory". Furthermore, the community implemented basic audiovisual preservation processes, including strict digitization standards and differentiated copies for both preservation and access. This initiative proves that true archival sustainability requires the emotional and political engagement of those who inhabit the territory, constituting a practical example of community audiovisual preservation models. Aligning with the conference theme "Screen Memories in Dialogue", this presentation reveals how marginalized groups can deconstruct structural erasure through self-representation. We conclude that the decentralization of audiovisual heritage is a fundamental step toward healing historical traumas and shaping inclusive futures.

As concern mounts regarding the global climate crisis, the environmental impact of audio-visual archiving has been widely recognised as an urgent concern. Thus, it has become vital that archival institutions critically reflect on their praxis, their responsibility to the environment and to memory, and their narration of archival loss. In dissecting this, a pervasive tension is revealed between the professional aspiration for permanence and the stark reality of precarity. Unfortunately, this dialogic gap remains underexamined, particularly in the public-facing contexts where archives construct their identities. In response, the project at the heart of this presentation investigates how permanence, visibility and ephemerality are narrativised and communicated publicly by six FIAT/IFTA member institutions. Through a systematised audit of accessible catalogues, official communications, mission statements, websites, and social media presences, our goal is to better understand how these archives represent their purpose, negotiate discourses of loss, and make themselves visible (or invisible) in the digital landscape. 
This year marks the 5th and 10th anniversaries of two devastating fires at the Cinemateca Brasileira facility (2016 and 2021). With the FIAT/IFTA conference being held at an institution so familiar with archival loss, we feel it is both poignant and necessary for a discussion of permanence, visibility and ephemerality to hold a powerful presence in this space. Further contextualised by an increasingly critical climate reality and a plethora of rising geopolitical tensions, we also believe that in 2026, the notions of loss, legacy and mortality are more palpable than ever. In turn, the recent emergence of high-concept ultra-long-term media storage technologies, such as DNA-based data solutions, provides a stark contrast. As mass-digitisation projects and novel experimental technologies tease the potential of more permanent futures for cultural memory, we propose to initiate a dialogue between the institutions at the very heart of these debates.

The TV Cultura Documentation Centre (1969) brings together an unusual variety of materials for a TV archive. Cedoc is responsible for implementing preservation, cataloguing, digitization, and dissemination actions for the collection under its care.The first challenge of the Cedoc Modernization Project, which began in 2021, was to separate each media and item, with the goal of safeguarding the originals represented by a vast range of materials to be preserved. The collection contains nearly 1 million items, including documents, props and scene mock-ups, objects and models that make up sets and studio scenery, a pinacotheca with sculptures and paintings from different eras created by artists now recognized for TV program scenery, a technological arsenal for telling the history of TV, up to thousands of open-reel videotapes with recordings of radio stations AM and FM, thousands of videotapes from Quadruplex to the last formats, 16mm films, a photographic collection documenting the history of TV, and the making of hundreds of programs, and a library containing publications used as sources by the TV program production teams.The purpose of this presentation is to show how each sector of Cedoc relates with each other and to current TV production, how the archive is transformed into digital media and reused for new TV productions, and what strategies are used for access and licensing, considering the paradigms of audiovisual archives in the digital age. Also, the implementation of the media asset management, especially when data came from all sorts of databases developed internally, at different times, by the Engineering Department, to support audiovisual content search tools archived in the digital repository.

Based on the preliminary survey of the film holdings of the Museu da Imagem e do Som de Campinas (MIS-Campinas), this paper discusses how audiovisual archives within safeguarding institutions are currently strained by material deterioration, technological obsolescence, and new digital regimes of visibility. While photochemical and magnetic formats preserve traces of documentary, educational, amateur, and dissident practices that expanded democratic horizons of audiovisual culture, their survival is threatened not only by physical decay but also by exclusion from contemporary systems of description, circulation, and intelligibility. In this sense, the audiovisual archive is understood not as a mere repository, but as a space of arkhē: an instance of origin, consignation, and power in which it is decided what may be remembered, accessed, and activated in the future.
The research combines survey, identification, cataloguing, cleaning, and remapping of the film collection, approaching these procedures as critical practices of mediation and legibility. The case of MIS-Campinas makes it possible to question the position of local and regional archives in the face of the urgent need to preserve obsolete media while simultaneously building archival networks capable of connecting collections, communities, researchers, and public policies.
The paper argues that the future of these collections depends not only on digitization, but also on safeguarding policies, critical metadata, mediated exhibition practices, and cooperative infrastructures capable of resisting algorithmic standardization and the marginalization of non-hegemonic repertoires. From this perspective, MIS institutions may be rethought as polymorphic museums: hybrid spaces in which archive, exhibition, education, and community are articulated as forms of material, symbolic, and political resistance.

The objective of this presentation is to reflect upon the state of digital preservation in Brazil within both the public and private sectors. This analysis is conducted through two case studies: Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) and Rede Globo. This work summarizes research compiled for an academic article currently in its final stages of preparation.
Established in 2007, EBC represents the unification of what is estimated to be nine public communication outlets, including TV Brasil. In addition to the television archives produced by the station itself, EBC inherited collections from defunct educational broadcasters: TVE Maranhão, founded in 1969, TVE Rio de Janeiro, created in 1975, and TV Nacional de Brasília, which was inaugurated in 1960. Over its nearly twenty-year history, the company has sought to adapt to technological innovations in the preservation of and access to television archives. Since 2015, EBC has utilized a Media Asset Management (MAM) platform, which enables the digital archiving of raw footage and television programs, as well as the viewing, downloading, and keyword-based searching of assets. This system is gradually replacing the legacy IAcervo platform, which primarily recorded media formats and metadata such as cataloging details, synopses, and production dates. In line with this modernization, the Archives and Research Department implemented a digitization project in 2019 for U-matic (KA) media. These tapes contain some of TVE Rio’s most significant programming, such as Sem Censura, No Mundo da Bola, and Edição Nacional.
Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcaster, was founded in 1965. Its documentation efforts began in 1974 in Rio de Janeiro, though the CEDOC (Documentation Center) department was not officially inaugurated until 1976. The collection is stored on a wide variety of media formats developed over the decades for audio and video storage, ranging from Quadruplex and U-matic tapes to contemporary LTO (Linear Tape-Open) technology. Content that was originally captured on magnetic tape is now captured digitally via binary code; however, this still necessitates storage solutions, whether physical media or virtual environments such as the cloud. Rede Globo has also undergone a significant evolution in its processes, progressing from paper-based cataloging stored in folders to sophisticated computerized systems. Initially, these systems were developed by in-house engineers; subsequently, the company entered into agreements with Dalet, and later Vizrt and DIVA, to outsource these services. Concurrent with this process is the digitization of analog media, generating digital assets that allow for a fully digital production workflow. This transition further facilitates the long-term conservation of original physical documents by reducing the need for repeated handling, as digital versions become the primary point of access. The purpose of this thirty-minute presentation is, therefore, to reflect on the Brazilian preservation landscape through a dialogue between these two distinct institutional experiences.