Across this year’s festival programme small-scale, historic and activist film archives come into focus: from the reactivations of the London Community Video Archive and Polish socialist-era film clubs in the Enthusiasts: Archive, to Archivistas Salvajes’ urgent preservation of Cuba’s endangered amateur cinema. Across disparate contexts, their projects foreground generosity, grassroots innovation, and collective authorship, tracing how portable technologies and independent networks have documented everyday life, ritual, labour and struggle.

On the occasion of Dr Ed Webb-Ingall’s (project director, LCVA) new publication BFI Screen Stories: The Story of British Video Activism, which “reveals the grassroots radicalism of generations of video activists who put cameras in the hands of campaigners and marginalised groups to equip them to challenge authority and fight for tangible change,” here is an open conversation to explore the politics and possibilities of preservation.

Bringing together artists, archivists and researchers working with amateur and community moving image, the discussion will consider how archives can operate not simply as repositories of the past, but as active sites of exchange and public memory.

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