FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The Western Balkans, shaped by the legacy of former Yugoslavia, hold a rich and diverse audiovisual heritage that reflects the region’s complex history, cultural plurality, and evolving national identities. However, this heritage faces numerous challenges stemming from political tensions, historical antagonisms, and unequal access to preservation resources. Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, the centralization of archives in Belgrade led to significant disparities in access and preservation capacities across the region.

The linguistic and cultural diversity of the Balkans further complicates efforts to safeguard and promote these archives. Each country encounters distinct obstacles, from a lack of infrastructure and technical skills to varying levels of political will and funding. In this fragmented landscape, collaborative initiatives offer a vital pathway toward bridging these gaps, encouraging mutual understanding, and reinforcing the shared memory that binds the region. By pooling resources and expertise, such initiatives can overcome national limitations and promote a collective responsibility for preserving this common heritage.

To address these issues, national broadcasters from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, and the Vojvodina region will launch the project “My Balkan(s)” in September, with support from the French Embassy in Serbia. The French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) will act as a knowledge partner. A roundtable marking the project’s launch will serve as a starting point for open dialogue and strategic cooperation.

Experts and stakeholders will discuss key challenges related to audiovisual preservation, technical needs, regional cooperation, and content creation. The goal is to foster a shared vision, promote skill exchange, and lay the groundwork for a sustainable and inclusive model of audiovisual heritage valorisation in the Western Balkans.

This presentation aims to discuss the ongoing National Research Project funded by the European Union SAFE (the SustainAbility of italian Film hEritage: archival infrastructures, digital preservation, and stewardship Strategies) and its outcomes. The non-theatrical Italian film archive community is daily engaged in dealing with highly complex and internally diverse issues: on the one hand, aligned to international standards or part of recognised federations, on the other and not infrequently on the fringes of institutional, legislative and governmental procedures and frameworks.  

To adequately explore the main research questions around three axes - archival infrastructures, digital preservation, and stewardship strategies -, the methodological framework for this research draws on three key areas of study: critical infrastructure along with archival and museum studies; digital film and critical digital humanities; and media archaeology combined with media sustainability. SAFE is carrying out three macro-actions of applied research: monitoring and analysing the infrastructural sustainability of preservation centres; surveying digital preservation practices and protocols, collecting and sharing stewardship strategies. A digital atlas addresses these intentions, being a tool derived from the digital humanities’ methodological framework through data visualization. Such exchanges are crucial for building a resilient and sustainable future for film heritage.

Beyond technical solutions, the SAFE initiative emphasizes the role of archives in fostering cultural memory and community engagement. By addressing environmental, cultural, and ethical dimensions, the project offers a holistic approach to the challenges of the digital age. Its outcomes will not only benefit Italian film archives but also contribute to global efforts to safeguard cultural heritage in an era of rapid technological and ecological change.

AVI - Italian Association of Video Libraries and Media Libraries was born out of an unexpected event, and accidents can sometimes turn into ‘opportunities’.

Founded as an Association on October 24, 2001, in Cesena, its primary goal was to offer legal guidance on issues related to audiovisual materials management.

Today, AVI represents over 300 Italian audiovisual archives and serves as a key representative body in the cultural, scientific, technical, legal, and legislative fields, advocating for the organization of services and documentation in institutions preserving invaluable cultural heritage.

AVI has supported affiliated public and private institutions through workshops and meetings on topics like conservation, access to collections, and copyright. The evolving nature of copyright remains a challenge due to changes in audiovisual production and distribution, which have expanded access and platforms.

This revolution has pointed out challenges in preserving audiovisual works, particularly in locating both current and past Home Video editions, for which AVI organizes an annual award for the best national and international releases.

These issues, along with the need for professional development have been highlighted to both the public and industry experts. Since 2017 AVI has organized discussions at the annual Convegno delle Stelline - Biblioteche.

What goals does AVI set for the future?

- Encouraging digital lending;
- Promoting specific licenses for multi-subject screenings;
- Building new partnerships;
- Discussions with home video producers for usage licenses;
- Cataloging archives to increase collection visibility;
- Training and updates.

AVI’s connection with institutions such as RAI Teche, Mediaset, RSI, Cineteca di Bologna, Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori e Audiovisivi, Archivio Luce/Cinecittà, Museo del cinema di Torino, Images en bibliothèque will undoubtedly play a role in safeguarding audiovisual culture from a contemporary perspective.

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the television industry is increasingly required to adapt to new technologies and workflows to meet both creative and operational demands. The Mediaset Fiction case study illustrates how a comprehensive business process reengineering (BPR) approach can streamline the complex workflows of Media Management, involving end to end processes from prospecting, to production, approval, and distribution of related content.

The project focuses on the lifecycle of Fiction materials, examining the intricate steps involved in managing audiovisual assets—such as episodes, trailers, scripts, and audio files. The core of the project lies in the collaborative efforts of multiple internal departments and external stakeholders and production companies, each playing a crucial role in the process from ideation, to raw material approval till final delivery, including different steps from preview, to validation, ingest, standard and 4K quality control, conversion till publishing in the library, ready for linear and/or OTT distribution. Additionally, the project encompasses other related processes, such as the creation of promotional materials and the delivery of assets for social media and press office activities.

The complexity of this process is underscored by challenges such as managing fragmented content, scheduling processes, capacity constraints, especially in 4K production, emphasizes the evolution of the Media Supply Chain through the adoption of advanced ERP tools for content management, and the automation of approval cycles for faster, more efficient workflows.

As a strategic project, Mediaset Fiction not only highlights the technical complexities and operational efficiencies required in modern media production but also underscores the importance of archive management and the strategic re-use of content. In fact, Mediaset fiction materials play a crucial role even in the sales division, which main activities are commercializing, promoting and selling assets to external networks, TV channels, and other stakeholders.

In the digital era, television archives have evolved from static storage to dynamic assets that drive both operational efficiency and creative innovation. In this context, they are no longer just repositories; they are central to fostering innovation, improving collaboration, and maintaining a competitive edge in the fast-evolving media landscape.

This project addresses the urgent need to preserve an important piece of heritage at risk: approximately 10K hours of RAI news programs produced between 1952 and 1985, currently stored on 350K 16mm reels. These reels document the formative years of Italian television and are threatened by deterioration due to the vinegar syndrome, necessitating immediate physical and digital preservation.

The project goals include having a digital equivalent of film reels for long term digital preservation, having digital copies suitable to any repurpose in current media environments, and preserving the cleaned and repaired films in the best possible condition, to stop physical deterioration.

The project, slated for completion in early 2026 with partial funding from the Ministry of Culture, employs state-of-the-art digitisation technology to create high-quality digital versions in standard, interoperable formats. RAI oversees the entire process, coordinating external providers and ensuring rigorous technical quality control, logistics management, and the creation of synchronised audio-video clips.

A key aspect is the application of AI techniques for automated metadata generation, including transcriptions, facial recognition, summaries and more. This metadata, alongside the digitised content, is integrated into RAI’s content management system, enabling future reuse in production and research.

A low-resolution version of the entire collection, including metadata, will be made accessible for research and educational purpose, through a national digital platform, to public bodies and universities.

This end-to-end migration project, executed within a constrained timeframe, represents a significant undertaking involving diverse teams and a competitive public tender process.

The integration of AI-powered metadata extraction, the commitment to both long-term preservation and immediate exploitation make this project a compelling case study in digital heritage preservation.

The extensive audiovisual archives of Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) represent a rich, underutilized resource for production research. A particularly valuable yet challenging collection is the RTVE Film Archive, encompassing news programs from the 1950s to the late 1980s. While undergoing digitalization to improve accessibility, a significant portion of this news collection lacks accompanying sound and suffers from non-informative titles, hindering effective retrieval.

Our central research questions focus on how to effectively explore this news film collection for production needs, evaluate the performance of multimodal information retrieval technology in this context, and determine the feasibility and integration strategy of resulting metadata into the existing archive management system.

Focusing exclusively on non-textual, video-only content, we explore how to effectively represent video content in the absence of accompanying text or metadata by embedding both textual queries and video visual features into a shared vector space. This methodology utilizes the CLIP model to generate embeddings of video frames and natural language queries, constructing a multimodal semantic space where semantic similarity is measured by the proximity of representation vectors. The VTR system pipeline encompasses video analysis, semantic analysis, vector database ingestion, and search with relevance feedback, allowing users to query the film archive using natural language or example images.

The main contributions of this PoC include a demonstration of a functional VTR system for retrieving information from a film archive without relying on existing metadata, an evaluation of the effectiveness of joint semantic space representation for this task, and insights into the potential and challenges of integrating such technologies into existing media archive workflows.

Discussions, regulations, and protocols to guide sustainable development in archives are often championed by professional associations and widely disseminated online, in-person meetings, and forums.  Many of these global standards, best practices, and green sustainable practices are easier to implement in technologically advanced countries and more challenging in those with unequal economies, political instability, long histories of colonization, and neocolonization. This paper calls attention to the need to move away from the convenient and homogeneous division of the global north / global south to understand specific contexts of sustainability work by audiovisual archives in Latin America and the Caribbean. The discussion focuses on research practices, recycling, and equipment repurposing as key aspects of promoting green archives. Illustrating specific examples of research leading to the fabrication of AD stripes, archival supplies, and adapting telecines to scanners yields a discussion of intrinsic characteristics of archival institutions to engender a more fair and informed dialogue with contemporary global efforts to foster and support green archives.

Digitisation is often seen as central to decolonising museums and archives by enhancing access and inclusion. However, many practices risk reproducing colonial structures by privileging institutional perspectives and erasing crucial contextual relationships. This project addresses such issues through the re-digitisation of archival materials from the 1947 expedition to Colombia, Panama, and Peru by the Ethnographic Museum of Gothenburg, confronting gaps and biases in earlier digitisation efforts.

We begin with a critical review of previous digitisation projects, revealing undocumented selection criteria, loss of context, and institutional bias. Using a decolonising toolkit focused on reflexivity, transparency, and contextual integrity, we aim to re-digitise three photo albums from the expedition, preserving their original structure while integrating related, previously overlooked materials such as travel journals, correspondence, and financial records. This approach reconnects visual and textual sources to offer a more layered narrative.

Our method aligns with records-continuum theories, which challenge colonial provenance and advocate for concepts such as parallel provenance, archival multiverse, and critical reflexivity. These frameworks expose how archives shape historical narratives and highlight the colonial roots of many museum collections.Through the application of these tools, frequently guided by developments in AI, our goal is to decolonise and open the archive to multiple perspectives.

Through comparison with earlier digitisation efforts, we show how decolonising methods can reshape archival practices, fostering more equitable, transparent, and adaptive workflows that resist colonial legacies and support future reinterpretation.

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) is a 2000 French documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film addresses themes like social inequality, dignity and resilience, food waste, and sustainability, making it resonate with contemporary issues. It delves into various forms of gleaning, the practice of collecting leftover crops from fields after the harvest. Shot with a handheld digital camera, it captures intimate and spontaneous moments, featuring unique visual elements such as heart-shaped potatoes.

Twenty-five years after its initial release, l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) and Ciné-Tamaris, the distribution company for the works of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, are offering students worldwide a unique opportunity to explore Varda's work. Leveraging INA's expertise in preserving, describing, and providing access to heritage collections, all the raw footage from The Gleaners and I is now available online. This comprehensive resource includes the edited film, separate audio tracks, and a pedagogical kit with photographs and press releases. Students can explore and use this raw material to create their own versions of the film and study Varda's editing techniques.

By making the documentary’s rushes available, Ciné-Tamaris and INA continue the educational mission initiated by Agnès Varda herself. This project not only preserves an exceptional piece of cinematic heritage but also fosters a new generation of filmmakers and scholars, encouraging them to engage deeply with Varda's innovative approach to documentary filmmaking.

AiDitor is ORF's in-house AI lighthouse project, spearheading innovation in the area of editorial workflows and multimedia content worfklows. This cutting edge initiative aims to revolutionize the way editorial teams operate by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and unlock new creative possibilities.

At its core, AiDitor is an intelligent content workflow assistant that aggregates and integrates multiple AI services, making them accessible through a user-friendly, one-click operation interface. This centralized AI hub, that is based on individualized workspaces empowers editorial teams to leverage state of the art technologies with ease, enabling them to transcribe audio and video content, generate concise summaries, Headlines or craft engaging social media posts, and even generate entire online stories.

AiDitor's capabilities extend far beyond text-based tasks. It offers advanced video intelligence tools, such as gender analysis, enabling editors to gain valuable insights. Additionally, it provides audio enhancement features, ensuring that audio quality meets the highest standards. One of the most exciting aspects of AiDitor is its integration with the latest large language models, which serve as a powerful AI playground for the entire company.

Sign language is a crucial mode of communication for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community. However, sign language content in video archives often lacks structured indexing and accessibility, making it difficult to search, analyze, or utilize for linguistic research and education. This proposal aims to develop a computer vision-based system to automatically detect, track, and analyze sign language motions in video archives, enabling efficient retrieval and study of sign language content.

This project proposes a novel approach to enhancing sign language accessibility in video archives using computer vision and deep learning. By implementing automatic recognition, annotation, and searchability, the proposed system will provide valuable tools for researchers, educators, and the DHH community.

Although audiovisual archives have traditionally focused on preserving the final broadcast content, there is growing recognition of the strategic value embedded in the production process itself. This presentation is based on a Master’s research project that investigates how production design archives — including art direction, set design, costume design, makeup, props, and graphic design — can become assets for innovation, productivity gains, and memory preservation in media companies.

The presentation highlights how the integration of these production design assets into Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms — combined with the use of ontologies, taxonomies, metadata governance, and artificial intelligence — enables new forms of reuse and supports strategic decision-making. These often-overlooked records hold significant potential to enrich future productions and to feed AI-based systems for metadata generation and generative content creation.

The session will discuss how aligning artistic production archives with a broader archival strategy — especially through MAM/DAM system integration — creates synergies that elevate the archive from a passive repository to a dynamic competitive resource, through interoperability between platforms. It will also address the risks of neglecting these materials, particularly in a landscape where AI tools rely on rich, diverse, and well-structured data.

Through concrete examples, this presentation aims to provoke reflection among archive managers: are we truly valuing everything that forms the history of our content? Does our organization recognize that what happens behind the scenes — the production design process — is also one of its most valuable assets?

This project explores how Italian public television has constructed the figure of the "foreigner" – colonized subject, migrant, refugee, the "other" – through the lens of the RAI audiovisual archive. The investigation focuses on a curated selection of programs and archival footage from the 1950s to the present, analyzing the evolution of language, imagery, and narrative frames linked to otherness. In the absence of television material from the colonial era, the project examines how that historical experience has been portrayed retrospectively, shedding light on how public broadcasting has either restored or erased its memory. From this starting point, the analysis moves through narratives of internal migration, immigration flows from the 1980s onward, and evolving discourses around multiculturalism, national identity, and public security.

The aim is to show how the audiovisual archive functions not only as a repository of public memory, but also as an active agent in shaping cultural categories and hierarchies. In an information-saturated world, still dominated by polarized discourse, revisiting the archival past becomes a way to reflect critically on its responsibilities in the present. Particular attention will be devoted to the language used in TV programs, highlighting how expressions such as vu cumprà (a derogatory term for migrant street vendors), extracomunitario (a bureaucratic term for non-EU foreigners, often used pejoratively), and maranza (slang for a working-class youth with stereotyped behavior and style, sometimes racialized) have helped shape a distorted and often stigmatizing imaginary. Through this focus on vocabulary and visual rhetoric, the project contributes to the broader debate on the public role of broadcast archives, not only as tools for historical inquiry, but as critical spaces for understanding the continuities and fractures in representations of the other, and for exploring the complex relationship between media, society, and alterity.

On both shores of the Mediterranean, Tunisia and Italy have a shared past. Waves of migration have followed one another for centuries between the two shores, leading to the settlement of the Italian community in Tunisia.

Migration and integration have accompanied the trajectory of Italians in Tunisia, we propose through this multi-media audiovisual and written research to present the evidence provided by the archives on the Italian-Tunisian heritage, this archive search concerned the archives of Tunisian Television, namely the two collections of television programs from the 80s “Italiet” and “Sikiliet”, on Italy and Sicily as web as the two seasons of the Ramadan soap opera “harga” from the years 2021-2022.

We also used written references from the Tunisian National Archives and the National Library, as well as online resources and books written by Italian researchers with a migratory past from the cities of Livorno, Tuscany, Sicily, and Genoa.

This research is essential for tracing the contemporary history of Tunisia and Italy, of the Italians who remained in Tunisia since its independence in 1956.

It is essential to represent the cultural framework of Italian migrants and the framework of the professions practiced in Tunisia, as well as the impact of their integration into Tunisian culture in search of a shared Mediterranean identity.

Resources:
- Tunisian Television Archives
- Archives of the National Archives of Tunisia
- Archives of the National Library
- Online Resources

Since 1959 the Netherlands have been sourcing natural Gas through a company (NAM) from under the feet of the people of Groningen. This has been a success story for more than 50 years. Working in the Natural Gas Industry was something to be proud of.

Then came the earthquakes. In the province of Groningen people started seeing cracks in their homes. It took years to get the Dutch government and the NAM to acknowledge the root cause of the problem, the mining of natural Gas.
The government decided to handle the situation, but nothing much happened. The inhabitants of Groningen that were effected sometimes had to leave their home for years.

In short, the government failed their people as was acknowledged: Between 2021 and 2023, the Dutch House of Representatives conducted a parliamentary survey on the extraction of natural gas in the Groningen field and the long-term problems that resulted from this. The aim of this survey was to gain insight into the decision-making process on natural gas extraction, earthquakes, damage handling and reinforcement.

The Groningen Archives (Groninger Archieven) has made it company policy to document everything about the mining of Natural Gas, the good years and the bad.

We have hundreds of 16mm films of the early years of Gasunie (an energy network operator. In the Netherlands. We also preserve oral history interviews. The interviews reflect the early years as well as the end years of this period. The interviews are conducted by a foundation, Ooggetuigen van de geschiedenis (Eye witnesses of history).

We were an advising party, as well as the preserving and publicising party. We want the stories of the people to be part of this archive, researchable online, and we think that we can add to truth finding and our work can help relieve the trauma of the effected people by letting them be part of the archive. Actual people with a voice and a story.

The talk will be about our future plans and idea’s for an inclusive approach to archiving.

In the Indian entertainment market, competition between television, online streaming content and film is fierce. With managers reluctant to put money where it cannot grow exponentially, broadcast archives of studios are a rarity. As large conglomerates take over smaller media houses, it appears that they are disinterested in preserving their own content, unless it functions as a commodity.

The recent surge in re-releases of older films has prompted studios to scramble for distributor copies for restoration. This is motivated by profit than genuine concern for the film’s artistic or archival significance, highlighting a power dynamic how broadcast data from private studios is valued, influenced by ‘relations of privilege and social control’. (Appadurai 1994).

But small private collectors ardently rescue, safeguard, digitize and archive broadcast collections. Applying the four types of commodities theory by Jacques Maquet (Appadurai 1994) these are ‘ex-commodities’ - materials retrieved from the commodity state and placed in some other state. Broadcast archives of large studios are ‘commodities by destination’- objects intended principally for exchange.

This paper unpacks ‘Everything is possible, and nothing is true’ in broadcast archiving by analyzing the production and archiving policies of two major production studios in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. We ask, what is the cultural and archival value of the content and material when everything is created for consumption, but nothing is deemed fit for retention? We place this treatment next to the meaning-making practices of two private film- related material archives, The Cinema Resource Centre and Archive of Indian Music in South India. With safeguarding their collection and public engagement at the core of their work, we see that individual collectors place immense social and cultural value in preservation and digitization with profits not being their mainstay and collections as ex-commodities.