Inside the Archive #58: Major milestone and artists in the archive

As part of the Our Screen Heritage project, the BFI National Archive has been collecting 400 works of online moving image. In December last year, we finally hit this target just in time for the holidays. It’s a huge achievement, and some of the key staff involved in the project have shared their thoughts on what they have learned and their hopes for the future.

One of the many joys in my role has been identifying the creators and bodies of online works we’d like to preserve. It has been exciting to establish new relationships with creators that may not have known or worked with the BFI before. We’ve also had the pleasure of co-designing the selections with the creators, which has been particularly fascinating.

There have been some hard moments, and it has not always been easy or possible to bring in everything we had hoped for. This has highlighted that there is so much online moving image we would still love to collect, and so much of it is still at risk of loss.

Making the cultural case, establishing new workflows, agreeing our collective ways of working, and documenting the choices and processes has helped us work through these challenges. I feel proud of my part in the project and, importantly, what we have achieved collectively to reach this milestone.

In my ten years at the BFI, I’ve learned many of the unique ways in which different moving image formats are at risk of obsolescence. Working on this project has underlined why films and videos distributed on the internet should also be treated with urgency and care.

My role in the project has involved two years of research, planning, curatorial selections and many conversations with creators. We have also started to survey what online content survives and what doesn’t, which led us to work in unprecedented and collaborative ways to make sure that content gets preserved. This has been rewarding, and every acquisition has expanded my perspective, approach, knowledge and patience. In a lot of cases, I’ve become an outright fan.

As the project wraps up, I’m looking forward to sharing more about specific case studies and their archival journey. Enough can’t be said about how many different people and teams have worked on this project and how valuable that collaboration has been.

Since April 2024 I have carried out the quality control (QC) and ingest of the works acquired for the project, and it has been a huge learning curve for me. I am proud to say that I can now confidently read and understand smartphone metadata, which I had no experience of working with. I am thrilled that gaps in my digital media knowledge have been filled and that I can take this with me going forward.

There have been many exciting donations, but a personal highlight would be the WhispersRed ASMR videos. Acquiring these videos led to the hugely popular WhispersRed and BFI National Archive YouTube collaboration, which I was so lucky to be a part of. It was also very exciting working with Stephen McConnachie and Will Swinburne on the workflow for QCing and ingesting the Liz Truss Lettuce livestream videos, as it seems to be the longest born-digital work in the archive! The media attention this donation attracted was incredible to see.

The beauty of these acquisitions is that so many of them were made with love in someone’s bedroom with low-fi setups. Nevertheless, we’ve proven that these videos are just as valuable as those made with a high budget, and I’m honoured to have been part of preserving these files into the BFI National Archive.

Through this project we have captured an incredibly diverse and inherently incomplete picture of this world of moving image. A cultural and technological story told in the digital files we have preserved and the catalogue records we have created.

Creating these records has been the responsibility of myself and my fellow Digital Curatorial Archivists. We have documented interactive web series, early Flash cartoons and TikToks, which were all media unfamiliar to the archive when we began.

As we describe these works in our cataloguing, it’s hard not to wonder who we are describing them to and what we are preserving them for. You can find everything on YouTube – apart from any promises that it will all still be there tomorrow. However, this collection will be preserved in perpetuity.

Archiving film remains a preservation of the past in service of the future. We all hope the future of the archive is enriched by this encounter with the wonderful world of online video.

I’ve been part of the Our Screen Heritage project for only a few months, but so much has happened in that time. It has been a fascinating dive into internet history. I grew up in France so I’ve been delighted to recognise some videos that crossed the Channel into French online spaces.

For me, the best part of the internet is its ability to create communities and foster engagement, the way it allows us to connect with other people from outside of our local embodied bubbles and social milieux, and to give a platform to people who didn’t have the means to be heard before.

I’m glad that the online moving image, with its variety of forms and voices, is getting the recognition it deserves. I hope this project will inspire the BFI and other institutions in the UK and abroad to embrace new forms of art and communication.

Although I joined the project relatively late, I’ve learnt an enormous amount in a short space of time and feel proud of what I’ve been able to contribute. I’ve been lucky enough to work across a wide range of acquisitions.

A particular highlight was cataloguing an acquisition by content creator Kayleigh Unitt. Her work, which explores Welsh language and identity, prompted me to think more critically about our own cataloguing language. I’ve since raised the possibility of including both English and Cymraeg terms in relevant Collections Information Database (CID) fields, which feels like a meaningful step towards more culturally nuanced metadata.

Working with creators who never expected their videos to be archived has been both rewarding and challenging. As the project comes to a close my hope is that this marks the beginning of a much bigger conversation about what online video means for archives. I’m grateful to have been part of this first chapter.

Further information about the 400 titles that have been acquired will be shared in a future edition of the Inside the Archive blog. 

Our Screen Heritage is made possible with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.

This month, we are presenting Beyond the Frame: Women Filmmakers and their Archives, a season of screenings and events celebrating the work and legacy of two innovative filmmakers: Tina Gharavi and Gurinder Chadha. As archivists who now care for the work of these filmmakers, a key part of the programme has been to reconsider our practice in relation to their archives. Gharavi and Chadha’s films centre on themes of identity, gender, and politics, and their archives offer insight to their lived and professional experiences, which in turn support observations on the industry.

The season has emerged from two major, multi-year projects that spotlight the contributions of women to the film industry: Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Our Screen Heritage, supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding. To mark the occasion, we partnered with artist duo Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban, welcoming their creative practice into the BFI National Archive. For the programme, they have created a new piece responding to the archive of Gurinder Chadha, with a particular focus on materials relating to Bend It Like Beckham (2002).

Athen and Nina were granted special access to the papers, digital documentation and visual arts in the Gurinder Chadha collection, housed at the BFI Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted. They joined us, as well as post-doctoral researcher, Jessica Boyall, for a series of research appointments and discussions, where they explored key areas of Chadha’s collection. To reflect the hybridity of Chadha’s collection and working methods, the duo were encouraged to create a piece that engaged with both the digital and paper elements of the archive, and to explore the relationship between the two.

Athen and Nina cite Chadha as a formative influence on both their personal lives and their art. Their interest in archives is reflected in their creative practice, which considers ideas of ownership, inherited memory, and the reimagining of objects that might otherwise be overlooked or dismissed. Their work foregrounds personal and marginalised histories, repurposing everyday items that have passed through generations. As Athen and Nina have long been admirers of Chadha’s work, it was a pleasure to support them in accessing archival material connected to the films that mean so much to them. The elements they drew from the collection and the ways in which they have reworked archival fragments within their own artwork is particularly interesting. The partnership highlights how archives can inspire artistic practice, connect with new audiences, and explore innovative ways of interpreting both digital and physical materials.

Their new work, titled Even if the world forgets me, you please don’t, is a site-specific installation featuring photographs and keepsakes from the artists’ own lives, intersecting with recreated or reimagined elements from Bend It Like Beckham. These include ‘Superstar’ in Chadha’s own handwriting taken from a script annotation, as well as behind-the-scenes photographs from the production. The work embodies both the personal and collective, celebrating community and connection. It is grounded in Chadha’s own approach to storytelling and the director’s interest in the themes of tradition and love. By repurposing materials from Bend It Like Beckham and engaging with the tools used to archive such objects, the work reveals the act of archiving, offering audiences a glimpse into the labour behind both filmmaking and archival practice.

To accompany the installation, the duo were invited to present a post-screening talk, I was already on the path…, which followed the screening of Bend It Like Beckham on Monday 26 January 2026. During the talk Athen and Nina discussed, in their words, ‘the importance of small things, archiving as art and British Asian storytelling through the lens of Gurinder Chadha’s legacy’. We would like to thank Athen and Nina for their curiosity in archiving, engagement with Chadha’s materials and dedication to this partnership.

Beyond the Frame: Women Filmmakers and their Archives season has been made possible with support from the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, alongside funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The season is curated by me and Wendy Russell.

Even if the world forgets me, you please don’t is on display at BFI Southbank, on the Mezzanine outside the Blue Room, until Sunday 1 February 2026.

– Grace Johnston, Special Collections Digital Archivist

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.