Launched today, Our Screen Heritage is a vital stepping stone to pave the way for the BFI’s Screen Archive of the Future. The project will bring the BFI National Archive, the UK’s national collection of moving image, up-to-date by acquiring and preserving the story of moving image in the digital/online era and reflecting the diversity and richness of contemporary Britain today.
Our Screen Heritage will be a vital and fascinating record for generations to come of filmmaking in the 21st century, showing how creatives are filming, the stories they are telling and the platforms they are choosing to bring their work to audiences – from TikTok to YouTube, X to SnapChat.
Creating a ‘Screen Archive of the Future’ is a key tenet of Screen Culture 2033, the BFI’s 10-year strategy for film and the moving image, with the ambition to make the BFI National Archive ‘the most open moving image collection in the world’, reframing the public’s relationship with our shared screen culture and embracing wider screen stories and voices. Screen Heritage is for everyone, and Our Screen Heritage will help us better deliver this to audiences everywhere.
Central to this programme, the BFI is launching a call out for a new People’s Advisory Panel, 15 to 20 people from a variety of backgrounds and communities from across the UK and Ireland who will reflect the diversity the project hopes to achieve, help influence the new collection, as well as looking at how to reach and engage with audiences. People can now register interest and discover further details about the initiative, with the formal recruitment application period opening at the end of May.
Our Screen Heritage is a UK-wide story, and our national collections should better reflect the lives and stories of modern Britain’s rich and diverse cultural heritage and identity as well as the broad range of born digital moving image being created and the creators involved. Screen of Now: Contemporary Collecting will focus on bringing 400 at-risk ‘born digital’ contemporary fiction and non-fiction works from the last 20 years into the archive, in addition to a trial project to acquire and catalogue digital production material, to help diversify and modernise the national collection, enabling the BFI National Archive to remain a living and relevant national collection long into the future.
As a programme, Our Screen Heritage will be foundational in developing a Digital Acquisitions Infrastructure to help the BFI National Archive build our contemporary digital collections at scale, accurately and effectively as well as to keep up with best practices in the intellectual property and copyright and widen our knowledge to help open access and improve opportunities through future UK-wide public outreach and engagement programmes.
By surfacing the contemporary screen stories of now and sharing stories of the past which reflect wider audiences, we can come together to create the UK screen stories of the future.
Our Screen Heritage is a two-year programme (2024 to 2026) supported by National Lottery via the BFI Screen Heritage Fund.