FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

The purpose of this panel is to open a discussion on the skills required by audiovisual archive leaders in Latin America.

The objective is to explore, together with leaders of institutional, official, non-official, community, activist, and self-managed archives, how the "profile" of an audiovisual archivist is constructed in our region and what specific skills we have had to develop in accordance with our divergent realities and the influence of the current political and social climate and governments.

The panel will propose a dialogue based on a series of guiding questions, in which we could involve people with long careers as well as new leaders who can provide feedback on how they have integrated into the dynamics of our field, how the profession has (or has not) become professionalized, how we relate to best practices in the Global North, and how we communicate and educate our audiences and communities of interest about audiovisual archives. The objective of the dialogue could be, in a complementary way, the creation of a poster to be shared collectively, where we can recognize ourselves and enhance those characteristics that define audiovisual archivists in our region.

Early 20th-century archaeological expeditions produced a rich body of visual material: film footage, field photographs, lantern slides documenting landscapes, excavation methods and cultural contexts. Dispersed across museums, university libraries and national film archives, these film collections remain difficult to discover, cross-reference or integrate into contemporary research. This presentation reports on an ongoing project that applies AI techniques to support descriptive cataloguing and access in digitized early film archives.
The project centers on a corpus of records from institutions in Europe and North America. Using vision language models, it explores how AI-assisted workflows help integrate contextual metadata, including site, estimated date ranges, artefact types. The presentation goes through opportunities and challenges of existing models trained on modern visual conventions that differ from historical image quality, aesthetic and stylistic composition. It observes how black-and-white historical footage with inconsistent framing and labels requires domain-specific approaches, and which solutions can be envisaged to preserve the richness of early audiovisual information.
Beyond cataloguing, the presentation examines how automated archival description affects and transforms cultural memory. Text matches and visual similarity now allow researchers to reconstruct early film sequences across archives and curate thematic collections that reframe and reposition our understanding of historical events. The paper reflects critically on the digitization of early footage and its entanglements with automation: which screen memories can machines unlock?
By sharing epistemological reflections on early documentary film culture, this presentation aims to contribute to broader conversations in the FIAT/IFTA community about the responsible integration of AI into archival workflows and the renewed relevance of historical film collections as forms of cultural mediation.

During the 2025 Club World Cup, Globo’s Archive department, in partnership with the Sports Editorial team, conducted a proof of concept (PoC) using Google Vision Warehouse to explore new possibilities for content discovery and usage in live production environments.
 
The initiative focused on evaluating how artificial intelligence can transform the way content is retrieved and utilized in sports journalism and live broadcasting.
 
By leveraging automated video processing, the solution was able to interpret specific contexts and situations within the footage. This enabled a shift from traditional keyword-based searches to a contextual approach, significantly expanding the scope of content discovery.
 
In practice, the Sports team gained the ability to access content through contextual queries—such as specific game situations, crowd behavior, or visual elements—even when this information had not been previously indexed in the metadata. This new model increased the speed of content retrieval, added depth to editorial coverage, and enabled the discovery of previously underutilized assets.
 
The PoC demonstrated the strategic potential of AI within the Archive, making content more accessible, reusable, and relevant across diverse editorial contexts.

This presentation reflects on how a practical archival task inside a Uruguayan television broadcaster evolved, over sixteen years, into a knowledge-driven system for managing, contextualising and reusing audiovisual memory.
The project began in 2010, when I was assigned the recovery of a historical television archive using only handwritten paper notebooks as the primary access tool. At the same time, much of the collection still existed on ageing analogue and early digital videotape formats (1-Inch Tape, U-Matic). To make the material accessible, I had to learn through experimentation how to clean, restore and digitise playback machines that were already several decades old.
Coming from a generation that experienced both analogue video culture and the first stages of digital editing, I combined broadcast operational knowledge with self-taught experimentation. Early attempts using Word documents and spreadsheets quickly proved insufficient for the speed and precision required in daily television production. This operational pressure led me to begin learning programming and databases in order to recreate the logic of the paper workflow in digital form: locating content quickly, identifying the correct tape, and later the precise timecode inside the material, find actors etc.
As newsroom demands increased, the system evolved continuously through real-world use, driven by requests from colleagues who relied on rapid access to historical footage. Even after the archive department was closed in 2020, the project continued independently, incorporating long-term preservation logic, production workflows, contextual metadata, artificial intelligence support and large-scale efficiency testing using a personal dataset of more than one million media assets collected over years of archival practice.
This case study explores how necessity, situated learning and broadcast reality can generate technological innovation from within archival work itself.
That's my story.

Although local community experiences of the struggle leading up to democracy in South Africa are well documented, there is limited research on retrospective reflections regarding that time in the post-apartheid era. This study explores a body of audiovisual archives created by members of a local community in a 2024 art-creation event at the National Archives of South Africa. These depict experiences and memories of local people as they looked back on the struggle and are preserved in the archive’s collection.  The analysis of the audiovisual archives contextualises local community experiences as part of the attempt to construct their hitherto under-represented post-apartheid narrative for the purpose of historical continuity. It showcases the outcome of an active people-centred method to encourage and facilitate the creation of audiovisual archives in reclaiming cultural heritage as a tool of community engagement, resilience and resistance. This investigation reveals how community experience can generate audiovisual archives reconstruction of past experiences and memory and potentially lead to future healing.  

In the UK, Black homemovies have been historically under-collected and under-valued as a result of years of systemic and interpersonal racism. Distributed at the hands of those deciding what is of importance to collect, preserve and who they want to represent their country. Additionally, homemovies that are categorised to represent Black life in Britain are often through the gaze and context of the onlooker, leading to inaccurate, dangerous and racist storytelling and cataloguing. 


In response, ‘Undocumented’ sought to address these historical absences and inaccuracies. The first year of the project focused on building trust amongst the black community, introducing audiences to archives as a source of learning and inspiration but also making them aware of the gaps within them. This year was a vital foundation of uplifting the Black people as custodians of their own legacies and informing them that their homemovies are in desperate need of preservation. The second year focused on training 40 Black Screen Heritage Ambassadors, building confidence, skills, and trust in the archive sector, and supporting participants to digitise and preserve a selection of material. The 3rd year marks a significant step change: moving from training and initial collecting, into sustained ambassador activity and sector-facing leadership. 


In this presentation, we will discuss the results, learnings and challenges of this framework as a tool for other producers and researchers to utilise in response to gaps within archives and film history. Alongside this we will explain the conception of the programme, themes found in donated footage and key takeaways from participants regarding how this programme has developed them as Ambassadors of archive materials. We will also screen a trailer of the short-film ‘Custodians’ created by a programme participant Monalisa Chukwuma, which is a photographic and cinematic exploration of Black archival labour, community memory, and care. 

The presentation will be about how we gain the trust of the filmmakers and their subjects, about finding new collaborations and how this method is a gateway for us into communities that were hard to reach.


As the main example the presentation will be about Boy from the Dessa, a documentary series about Indonesian born musician Rudy Lentze, who came to the Netherlands as a baby. Rudy Lentze's personal history takes the viewer through major social and historical developments, including the colonial history of the Dutch East Indies, immigration, and the challenges of building a life from a complex migration background. Rudy's idiosyncrasy is rooted in the fascinating life story of a man born in Indonesia to an "Indo" father (with German roots) and a Sundanese mother, who was raised in the Netherlands. He grew up in a disrupted family caught between clashing cultures and nearly succumbed to it all — depression, anxiety, drug use, and alcohol. Still, like a classic (anti-)hero, Rudy managed to largely overcome his troubled youth and personal problems. Music was his salvation. 


This documentary is a collaboration between the filmmakers and the Archive. From the start we endorsed the making of this film, helping with finding and digitising the archive material, and in return we acquired the rich Lentze family archive, one of the few family archives of an Indonesian family. Including a lot of film- and videoreels, and audiotapes. This is part of an ongoing collaboration with filmmakers from Greater Groningen, mainly, but not exclusively through our themed website www.poparchiefgroningen.nl (the Groningen Poparchive). We help the artists, they add to our archive. With doing so we reach a different audience and we diversify our collection in an organic way. We have more than 30 'Rockumentaries' online, and with Boy from the Dessa as the latest feature, the archive is firmly rooted in that part of society. Regional stories, embedded in the national history.


The documentary series will be made available afterwards for all participants of the World Conference.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Television historians inevitably have to contend with gaps when examining the audiovisual archives of broadcasters and preservation institutions, especially when searching for records from the medium’s early decades. However, this is a communication technology — and a domestic device — whose development has enabled audiences themselves to engage in practices of capturing and archiving content, a dynamic that has expanded significantly in the online environment.


Today, many TV fans make use of collective digital video-sharing platforms to upload recordings of old programs, originally captured on VHS tapes or DVDs. Some of these users have become known for this type of activity, at times receiving audiovisual materials from professionals who once worked behind the scenes in television. Not infrequently, clips made available by these fans are also used in contemporary productions focused on the careers of television personalities. Even the disputes between these viewer-archivists and active TV networks — dissatisfied with having recordings of their productions shared by third parties — ultimately attest to the recognition achieved by these fans, who are transformed into “professional-amateurs” as they demonstrate competencies related to the history of television in Brazil.


This paper discusses how the archives of viewer-archivists, as well as fandom practices attentive to past content made available by TV channels on their over-the-top platforms, have contributed to the preservation and narration of Brazilian television memory. Although fan archives are shaped by a curatorial dynamic guided by personal taste and affective investments, they constitute important sources for researchers due to their potential to house records that are no longer present in the broadcasters’ own archives. Moreover, fans dedicated to monitoring the streaming catalogs of TV networks shed light on the very archiving dynamics adopted by media conglomerates over time, revealing continuities, gaps, and reconfigurations in the criteria used for the preservation of television archives.

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.

Since 2023, the Caracol Television audiovisual archive has been working on the technical verification and digitization of its 16mm film collection. This includes more than 3,000 newsreels and program rushes that remained unseen or unrecognizable for generations of viewers for over 50 years.
In partnership with the Faculty of Arts at Javeriana University, we have been working on an unprecedented process: digitization using a Gugusse Roller, a "handmade" technique that has allowed us to uncover images of our country from the 1960s and 70s. With the support of visual arts students, we have begun a training program that encompasses all stages of working with this type of material: verification, preparation, digitization, digital preservation, and licensing for creative projects.


This presentation will not only describe the details of the process but will also highlight the use of open-source technology to overcome the lack of a scanner. In addition, we will reflect on the importance of creating pedagogical processes for creative uses of the archive in our context.

This piece explores how the Madeja Archive was created and how it has developed over time. Madeja isn’t just any archive, it’s a dynamic, evolving collection housed within the Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo (FAC) in Uruguay. It all began in the early 2000s, driven by a genuine sense of urgency among artists and curators. They noticed that fragile audiovisual works from the late ’70s onward, recorded on U-Matic, VHS, Betacam, MiniDV, Hi8, and even film, were slowly deteriorating and at risk of disappearing forever.
But Madeja was never intended to be a cold, neutral storage room. From its inception, it was political, personal, and even a bit defiant. The archive emerged from moments when artists and curators discovered their own work decaying on shelves or realized that no one in Uruguay was supporting the preservation of independent audiovisual art. There were no public policies, no safety nets. Madeja approached preservation not only as a technical solution, but as a form of care, a gesture of resistance against being lost or erased.
Time operates differently within Madeja. It isn’t a neat, linear timeline. Each piece in the collection carries at least three layers of time (each layer occurring decades apart): 1. the moment the artist created it, 2. the moment it joined the archive, and 3. the moment someone revisits it to reuse or reinterpret it. Madeja preserves everything: tapes, boxes, handwritten labels, curated playlists, notes from the era. It isn’t just about digital files, it’s about maintaining the complexity and context of each object and the web of relationships around it. The archive ends up resembling a tangled skein (a “madeja” in Spanish) where different eras, technologies, and emotions are intertwined.
This presentation situates Madeja at the heart of important discussions about memory, media archaeology, and the ecological politics of digital preservation. It examines what happens when data exists within fragile environments, or when issues of power and funding (or the lack thereof) determine what survives. By emphasizing collective authorship, marginalized voices, and activist modes of archiving, Madeja understands memory not as a finished narrative, but as something always evolving. It’s about creating room for future curators, artists, and educators to keep these works alive and relevant, regardless of how much time goes by.

This presentation discusses the activation of audiovisual archives through pedagogical and creative practices developed in the Audiovisual Production Workshops at FGV CPDOC (Brazil), which completed ten years in 2024. The workshops are based on one of the largest collections of personal archives in Latin America and promote the production of short films using archival materials as both source and medium.
Since 2023, the workshops have been part of the project “New Perspectives on the Archive: Visuality, Circulation and Education in Women’s Archives” (FAPERJ/CNPq), focusing on women’s histories and the critical re-reading of archival collections. Through a practice-led approach, participants engage with archival documents not only as historical evidence but as material for reinterpretation, montage, and narrative construction.
The presentation examines selected films produced within this framework to explore how archival images are reactivated through editing processes that negotiate between institutional constraints, creative agency, and pedagogical goals. Particular attention is given to the tensions between technical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of archival reuse, including issues of visibility, silencing, metadata limitations, and representational bias.
By situating the classroom and the editing room as spaces of research, the paper argues that audiovisual practices can transform the archive from a site of preservation into a dynamic field of interpretation and circulation. In this context, montage becomes a critical operation that not only re-signifies images but also challenges dominant narratives, especially in relation to gender and the historical marginalization of women in archival systems.
The case study highlights how collaborative filmmaking processes can expand archival access, generate new forms of public engagement, and reposition audiovisual archives as active agents in the production of knowledge.

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.