Inside the Archive #76: Queer collaborations, centenary celebrations and a Victorian education

The BFI National Archive’s collection is a treasure trove of queer film gems, capturing a wide range of decades, characters, histories and stories. To unearth these gems, I have been taking part in a residency created by BACKLIT, a Nottingham-based studio, gallery and archive, and the BFI National Archive. The residency, entitled In the Margins of the Frame, has centred on exploring underrepresented stories in both organisations’ digital and physical collections.

I founded the Notts Queer History Archive in 2022 to preserve queer heritage through oral history interviews and the collection of historical items. I am proud to say that the archive now holds 210 oral histories, 1,440 items and 830 newspaper articles, all of which are documented in two books.

As I explored the archives, I found two documentaries in the BFI National Archive’s collection that were shot in the East Midlands and shaped parts of my archival research. A Boy Called Mary (1986) and More Than a Journey (1986) are part of the Six of Hearts documentary series, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The series was created by directors Paul Oremland and Caroline Mylon for Channel 4.

It is not just the documentaries turning 40 in 2026, but also the AIDS information distributed by the government in 1986 and 1987. To highlight this, I co-curated an exhibition titled 86:26: LGBTQ+ Film, Heritage and Archive with curator Jazz Singh Swali from BACKLIT, where we chose to show the public information films AIDS: Monolith (1987) and AIDS: Iceberg (1987) to highlight the impossibility of talking about queer nightlife without mentioning the HIV/AIDS crisis. We also screened the two episodes of the 1986 series Six of Hearts and hosted panel guests who spoke about queer life from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Jazz and I further populated the exhibition with pieces from the Notts Queer History Archive, such as DIY publications and adverts from 1986 and 1987, including the AIDS information leaflet. I also found work by Fin Serck-Hanssen/Bono, a Norwegian artist who photographed Divine, the John Waters film star and drag queen, performing in Nottingham in 1981. These photographs completed the exhibition.

On reflection, 86:26: LGBTQ+ Film, Heritage and Archive provided a space for intergenerational connections and community building. It was amazing to hear the positive feedback from younger attendees about hearing the older panel guests speak about queer life. From a residency perspective, working with experts from BFI and BACKLIT has shaped how I approach events and exhibitions. It was an incredible opportunity to learn how to engage audiences, design the flow of a space, and develop an event – something that, as a solo archivist on an independent archive, I do not have the chance to do. This will allow me to elevate my practice, for which I am incredibly grateful.

– CJ De Barra, Journalist, Author and Historian

September’s Projecting the Archive strand at BFI Southbank is celebrating the work of Bryan Forbes in his centenary year. The events kicked off on Friday 4 September with an all-day symposium discussing his acting, writing, producing and directing careers, followed by a screening of the BFI’s new 35mm print of his directorial debut Whistle Down the Wind (1961). Actress Hayley Mills was joined on stage by her co-stars, who reunited publicly for the first time in 65 years.

A surprise introduction by Bryan’s widow Nanette Newman was greeted enthusiastically by a packed NFT1 at BFI Southbank.

Actor Mark Gatiss took the stage on Sunday 6 September, to introduce the comedy heist film, The League of Gentlemen (1960), while Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) was hosted by 1970s exploitation writer David McGillivray. Author Cathi Unsworth shared her love of social realist film The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Nanette Newman returned on Tuesday 22 September to introduce The Wrong Box (1966).

The final screening will be King Rat (1965), Forbes’ look at the human side of the prisoner of war experience. The King Rat screening at BFI Southbank will take place on Tuesday 29 September and will be introduced by Bryan’s daughter Sarah Standing. Five of the six films were from the BFI National Archive, and staff helped enormously to identify screenable prints.

To learn more about Forbes and how unique items preserved in the BFI National Archive can shed light on his life and work, make sure to watch our latest Inside the Archive video.

– Josephine Botting, Curator (Fiction)

I’ve always loved visiting the V&A. It somehow manages to be both educational and escapist. On the one hand, there’s the obvious glamour of major exhibitions on Cartier, Dior and Chanel. On the other, there’s the pleasure of stumbling across objects that open up unexpected stories about design, creativity and everyday life. My kids also never tire of the Young V&A; from exploring the Mini Museum to crafting activities in the temporary galleries, it has become a home from home. The eldest even discovered a talent for origami at the Japan: Myths to Manga exhibition. True story!

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that one of my favourite projects at the moment is a new learning collaboration with the V&A Academy team. This three-year initiative is built around an interdisciplinary approach. The BFI brings expertise in film history and access to one of the world’s largest collections of film and television. The V&A contributes internationally renowned collections spanning art, design and material culture. By working together, we are able to uncover fascinating connections between film and object. What can a V&A object illuminate about a film from the archive? And what can a film reveal about an object?

Our first collaborative project, Living Pictures: Victorians on Film, launches this autumn with a three-day study experience exploring the late Victorian age. The invention of moving pictures is often overlooked as one of the many achievements of Queen Victoria’s reign, and British pioneers played a remarkably important role in bringing images to life. To explore this extraordinary period of innovation, films from the BFI’s Victorian collection will be discussed alongside photographs and other objects from the V&A’s collections, revealing what these materials can tell us about each other and the society that produced them.

The three-day study experience will be led by Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film at the BFI National Archive, and Mike Berlin, V&A Academy Year Course Director. It is available to attend as Living Pictures: Victorians on Film (online) or Living Pictures: Victorians on Film (in person), with the in-person programme taking place at V&A South Kensington and BFI Southbank, together with a walking tour through central London. The programme concludes with a curated screening of the spectacular large-format Biograph films, accompanied by live piano.

– Gemma Starkey, Online Learning Manager (Strategy, Production and Delivery)

2026 sees the centenary of a truly remarkable film, a classic as timeless as the Arabian Nights tales on which its story was based, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), created by a 24-year-old with an astonishing talent for creating silhouette art and then animating it for film. It is the earliest surviving feature-length animation film and one that had an underacknowledged impact on the future of that form, which has been the first cinematic experience for generations of children.

Lotte Reiniger, author, animator and director of this unique project, chose fairy tales as her subject (adopted also by Walt Disney for his features) and developed techniques with her team of collaborators, in particular the trick table, a multiplane camera rostrum, to shoot characters and multiple layers of background (also adopted by Walt Disney, who got the credit for this for many years).

The film, not the property of a major studio, struggled at first to get its audience, but once seen, it impressed all who saw it. It was championed by greats of the avant-garde (Walter Ruttman, Oskar Fischinger and Berthold Bartosch worked on it) and the art world – Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang among others.

In Britain, Reiniger was championed by the newly established Film Society both as a great filmmaking talent and as that rare thing, a woman director, in their famous programme F38 of all female directors in 1930 – recently recreated at the BFI Southbank.

It was the Society that acquired the tinted 35mm print that ultimately survived to us. At the start of the Second World War, the Society lodged its prints with the National Film Library (now the BFI National Archive) to save them from the Blitz. The negative, in Germany, was not so lucky and was destroyed in 1945. Reiniger’s three years of painstaking work might have ceased to exist had it not been for this print. The BFI’s role in preserving the film is a matter of great pride – it could easily have been just the stuff of legend – we could be talking about this as a lost film in almost mythological terms, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) would have really been the first animated feature film. The fact that the print was tinted was also fortuitous; the glorious colours are a large part of the aesthetic beauty of Reiniger’s creation that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

– Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film

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