Yesterday at the ACE Regional Meeting at the Grand Cinema Urania in Budapest for the FIAF Congress, more than 50 colleagues from film archives from all over Europe were present.
Sandra Den Hamer has opened the meeting by inviting all the colleagues to briefly introduce themselves, then proceeded to give an update on the Season of Classics and Ellen Harrington presented the Artekino Classics platform.
After a one-year stop due to the pandemic, ACE has returned in Bologna for its annual workshop during Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. The event, hosted by MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, was in collaboration with Europa Cinemas. The ACE workshop, moderated by professor Francesco Clerici, was divided in two sessions. The morning one was an opportunity to discuss the re-opening of cinemas and the presence of new platforms, while the afternoon was dedicated to film education.
The ACE executive committee met via Zoom on Wednesday November 11. The committee discussed the results of the ‘Survey on Future Digital Services’ sent to the Associates. 33 archives answered and this gave a good snapshot of the digital activities and needs of ACE members right now. The two main subjects that have emerged from the survey: the capacities and limitations in the archives for working with their own assets, and the common desire of the members for external collaboration and the future growth of their own platforms. The clear takeaway is the need for a common platform to bring people into closer communication with their colleagues from other institutions. It was also discussed the need to use the best practices developed for i-Media Cities for EFG. It was suggested the possibility of creating a digital task force for the project. EC has two different tasks: to ensure the sustainability and development of EFG and IMC, and the second one is to discuss the requests/wishes coming out from the survey.
The creation of a technical experts working group is necessary to draft a project for the further development of these ideas and platforms. The Romanian Film archive expressed a desire to join the EFG platform but four more members are needed to fulfill our obligation under the new DSI-4 grant to continue to grow the number of contributors.
During the future months, it’s vital to follow the associates in different countries facing the adoption of the Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market.
