Roundtable: Safeguarding and managing audiovisual heritage in a time of environmental crisis

How can we protect audiovisual heritage when climate change is putting film materials that are already under threat at further risk due to rising water levels, flooding, increasing humidity, and rapidly rising temperatures? And what can archival film materials themselves teach us about the environmental histories, present, and potential futures of the planet? This event addressed these and other questions, bringing together experts working with film archives in different ways – through preservation and digitisation, through research and writing, and in creative practice – from the perspectives of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Scotland. We explored how sharing experiences and knowledge across these different perspectives can offer an opportunity to forge new connections, strategies, and solidarities.

On Wednesday 4 September 2024, Dr Philippa Lovatt (Lecturer in Film Studies, University of St Andrews) hosted a roundtable discussion with invited speakers: Sanchai Chotirosseranee, Dr Julio González, Okkar Maung, Dr Emily Munro, Dr Juana Suárez and Dr María A. Vélez-Serna. A recording of the conversation can be viewed here.

The event was funded by the British Council in Myanmar through a Connections-Through-Culture grant, and was co-organised by Okkar Maung, Director of Save Myanmar Film and Philippa Lovatt as part of a series of events that explored the theme of sustainability in relation to film archives. Focussing on how to safeguard and manage audiovisual heritage in a time of environmental crisis, the project included a workshop about cinema heritage and paper materials restoration in Yangon; film screenings in Yangon and St Andrews; and an online public discussion.

Speakers:

Sanchai Chotirosseranee is the Deputy Director of the Thai Film Archive (Public Organization). He is on the executive committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the Southeast Asia-Pacific AudioVisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA). He is a film programmer for Thai Short Film and Video Festival and the Silent Film Festival in Thailand.

Dr Julio González is a researcher and teacher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), and a member of the Research-Creation Group in Visual Studies and Moving Image (GEVI – PUCP). He is part of the research teams in the projects “Political organization and visual culture in Peru: (self) representation, new social subjectivities and political struggles (1968-1992)” and “Diagnosis and preventive conservation of the film heritage of the film and television direction of the UNMSM.” Julio has a doctorate in Rural Development from the Metropolitan Autonomous University – Xochimilco, Mexico (2018-2021). He holds an MA in Cinematographic and Audiovisual Archive from the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola (Basque Country, 2022-2023) and an MA in Visual Anthropology and Anthropological Documentary from FLACSO (Ecuador, 2013-2015). His research and creative work centers on visual culture, memory, territory, social movements, political ecology and collaborative artistic practices.

Maung Okkar is a film archivist who founded the Save Myanmar Film organization in 2017 after completing a restoration course conducted by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in Bologna, Italy, and digitalization courses in the Thai Film Archive. Since then, Save Myanmar Film has been working on preserving audiovisual heritage and digital restoration projects despite the lack of the government’s support. Okkar‘s film career began at 15 when he starred in ‘Dat-khe,’ a feature film directed by his father – the celebrated Burmese filmmaker U Wunna. In 2009, Okkar joined Yangon Film School and his first documentary ‘Charcoal Boy’ screened and competed at 16 international film festivals. Since then he has gone on to make several documentaries and a short film. https://www.savemyanmarfilm.org

Dr Emily Munro (she/her) is a curator of moving image at the National Library of Scotland, a filmmaker and a writer. Her creative archive documentary ‘Living Proof: A Climate Story’ (2021) looks at Scotland’s energy history and complicity with the climate crisis. It has screened widely in its home country and abroad. Her recent film project, ‘Childish’ (2024), explores the choreography of childhood and children’s autonomy under the adult gaze. Emily has a longstanding interest in the environment and writes climate fiction and poetry. She runs creative writing workshops addressing climate grief and eco anxiety that use archive footage and poetry as points of inspiration. www.emilymunro.co.uk

Dr. Juana Suárez is Associate Professor and a Latin American Media Scholar at Tisch School of the Arts/Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, where she is also the Director of NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. Her work relates to Film and Media Archives, Media Archeology, Administration of Memory Institutions, Latin American/Latino-a Cinema, Cultural Studies and Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Immigration Studies. She is the author of Sitios de Contienda. Producción Cultural y el Discurso de la Violencia (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2010), and Cinembargo Colombia. Ensayos críticos sobre cine y cultura colombiana (Universidad del Valle, 2009; in English Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is also co-editor of Humor in Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the Spanish translator of Paul A. Schroeder-Rodríguez’s Latin American Cinema, A Comparative History (UCLA, 2016; Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2020). She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), Trustee of Flaherty Seminar and Board of Directors of the Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N), funded by a Mellon Foundation Grant. Full profile here.

Dr Maria Vélez Serna is a lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, and a film school graduate from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is the author of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces: Stories of Reinvention, Resistance and Community (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and co-author of Early Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Maria has also published on topics such as coal mining and useful cinema, archive film and extractivism. She has published on these topics in the journals Media + Environment and NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Maria also has a blog where she posts shorter articles related to her research: https://outwith.xyz/about/