Archive Screening Days 2022

What are the challenges and methods needed to bring cinema history to life? How can we frame a body of work so it can be shared more widely? In this wide-ranging presentation, filmmaker, film curator and writer Ehsan Khoshbakht demonstrates the process of mounting a major retrospective. In 2022, Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna – the world’s largest archive film festival – delivered a retrospective of director Hugo Fregonese. A neglected figure in Hollywood but with a history spanning his home country of Argentina as well as UK, Spain, West Germany and Italy, Fregonese’s life and career contained multitudes, and the retrospective introduced his work to a new generation. This session offers an insider’s view on the curatorial framework for building a retrospective as well as the practical challenges of sharing work outside regular circulation.

Programming rep cinema – selecting older titles outside of new release distribution – is one of the key ways independent cinemas can set themselves apart. But how can you develop this as a regular strand that gets people through the door and changes their mind about film history? And how can freelancers, pop ups and community spaces do their work sustainably, both inside and outside of indie cinemas? In this workshop for people of different experience levels of rep programming and marketing, we’ll share knowledge, challenges and solutions around doing great work with rep cinema.

Small gauge films (16mm and 8mm) are an underused resource in exhibition, but can be accessible in many contexts. In this session, artist, workshop facilitator and projectionist Lydia Beilby demonstrates compelling and creative methods to engage communities with showing film prints, from sharing personal archives to creating hand-painted abstract animations on film stock. To help illustrate the essential material difference of showing films on small gauge prints, there will also be a 16mm projection demonstration, and opportunities to ask questions.

How has work been preserved in Afghanistan across decades of instability and how has it survived the recent fall of Kabul? How can we represent the history of the country in all its complexities – both so its diaspora can access it, and so those outside the diaspora can gain a deeper understanding of Afghanistan? In this session, led by curator Parwana Haydar from independent global research collective and multimedia platform AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts & History), we will share examples from across the incredible breadth of Afghan filmmaking and society, as well as explaining how programmers can access these materials to share with their own audiences.

How do we as exhibitors use archive film to develop narratives and curatorial concepts that audiences will connect with? How can we encompass complex shared histories and reframe our past using film? How can we work practically with film archives and rights holders to build programmes that audiences can access in public? In this session, we’ll hear case studies from Showroom, Sheffield on their community project to use archive film to explore the history of the Manor Housing estate; and from independent curators Pavilion on their ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’ programme that used a wide variety of different types of archive film to tell the story of political discontent in the UK across four decades.