BFI FAN Champion – Screen Heritage Resources 2023-2026

Below, Andy has kindly drawn together the work that has been delivered, and the direction we’ll be taking from 2026 to 2029. The relationship between archives, exhibitors and audiences is an important one in any healthy film culture. We hope that the work that Andy and Film Hub NI will help FAN continue to highlight the rich screen heritage that the UK holds.

Since the formation of the BFI Film Audience Network in 2014, independent exhibitors have become more adept and confident in programming screening and events in partnership with the UK’s moving image archives. Challenging the notion that archive screenings are simply quaint events, attended by a niche and specifically older audience, BFI FAN members have delivered new and ambitious ways to engage wider audiences with film material from the past.

Screen Heritage Resource Guide

Charting this archive screening activity across BFI Film Audience Network’s first decade, the first act of as BFI FAN Screen Heritage Champion (2023-2026), supported by Film Hub Northern Ireland, was to gather all existing screen heritage guidance and collate it in one place for FAN members to springboard future screenings with wider exhibitors. The Screen Heritage Resource Guide listed best practice tips, programming ideas, case studies, key film festival dates, and a full listing of film distributors and up-to-date links to the thirteen UK National and Regional Film Archives.

For the second and third year research, we wanted to respond directly to feedback from BFI FAN members who asked for further support in representing communities of the UK more fully on our screens. Diverse moving image material is still limited in our Regional and National Archives, and while our archive partners are finding new ways to address this gap, we wanted to increase knowledge of all screen archive collections across the four nations to support further representation on screen, as well as seed future archive collaborations UK-wide with the membership.

Exhibiting the UK’s Hidden Moving Image Archives

Inspired by some members who had already proactively curated beyond the Regional and National collections, and spurred on by the speakers and discussions at the London's Screen Archives Conference 2024, we produced the ‘Exhibiting the UK’s Hidden Moving Image Archives’ guide, the first time all moving image collections in the UK had been mapped out. To develop new audiences and complement partnerships, a further 30 moving image archives and collections were highlighted alongside the Regionals and Nationals. This consisted of Artist Moving Image organisations, Activist and Broadcast collections, and importantly highlighted archives whose sole operation is preserving Working Class, Black, South Asian, South East and East Asian people and others of the global majority experience.

We chose the word ‘hidden’ as the locations and awareness of these UK’s film and television archives, can still largely remain concealed from the exhibition sector. To amplify further, we brought together two examples from these hidden archives, the Borders Community Film Archive and the London Community Video Archive, for a conversation on what material they preserved and how they reached audiences in their contrasting rural and urban contexts.

Demystifying Screen Archive Catalogues 

Side by side organisational visibility, the process of researching, sourcing and licensing films from archives can still be a foggy experience for most programmers. It is unlike booking a feature film with a distributor and instead involves a unique, intuitive and individualised approach for every creative archive enquiry.

So for the final year research, we wanted signpost tips to help exhibitors directly navigate journeys with screen catalogues more effectively and turn those early threshold stumbling blocks into new programming opportunities. Bringing fresh learnings from recent BFI funded access projects around keywords and contemporary collecting work with communities, we invited key voices from the archive sector to share early findings that would benefit FAN members. We brought together three practitioners from Northern Ireland Screen, London Screen Archives and North West Film Archive to discuss issues with access to archives and deliver

From the roundtable conversation that you can view in full here, we took the key takeaways that would resonate for programmers and produced the Demystifying Screen Archive Catalogues Toolkit to simplify and ease the sourcing process and enhance stronger links between screen venues and archives.

FAN Champion 2026 - 2029

Looking ahead for the next three years (2026-2029), FHNI will expand the FAN Screen Heritage Champion work from focus on archives towards repertory exhibition.

Over the past two years the sector and the national press have observed the growing appetite of young, mainly Generation Z (14-29) audiences, attending independent cinemas to see repertory, classic and restorations screenings, increasingly motivated to experience older films in a theatrical setting. We intend to interrogate this trend and how it can be applied to other audiences groups. We will produce new resources for FAN to maximise knowledge and audiences in this area.

This will include expertise in screening repertory film across the FAN with audiences, greater knowledge of screening various film, video and digital formats, and a firmer understanding of access to repertory distributors.

Please get in contact with your enquiries and areas of interest for screen heritage future work.

Thanks to all who have supported and assisted with the BFI FAN Screen Heritage Champion area 2023-2026. And Special thanks to Hugh Odling-Smee and Sara Gunn-Smith, Film Hub Northern Ireland, the Film Hub Managers, and the BFI Audience Team.