Filmoteca Española and SEFF (Seville European Film Festival) are committed to organize a two-day workshop titled “Programming European Heritage at Film Festival” during the festival, 5th-13th November 2022, at the city of Seville (Spain).
The workshop “Programming European Heritage at Film Festivals” will explore different forms of curating and screening heritage cinema within the global programming activity of a contemporary film festival. In the last years, European festivals that used to screen complete retrospectives of masters, solid subject-specific programmes or tributes to contemporary filmmakers (build with European heritage cinema), and even publish annual essays dedicated to its investigation, have been reducing or removing the presence of the cinema of the past in their offer.
In the 2021 SEFF edition, several Spanish archives and festivals gathered under the organization of a one morning workshop by the festival’s director, José Luis Cienfuegos, where the debate touched this pitiful reality. Several collaborations between Spanish audiovisual archives and film festivals were born at this encounter. The goal in 2022 is to widen the focus of this encounter.
Prior to the Spanish presidency of the European Committee (to be taken during the second half of 2023), the Spanish Film Archive and SEFF are committed to organize a workshop that will gather executive representatives of European archives to explain their active roles in preserving and recovering European cinema’s history, and the festivals rol (or duty) making these films visible in their programming slots.