Across this year’s festival programme, small-scale, historic and activist film archives come into focus: from the reactivations of the London Community Video Archive and Polish socialist-era film clubs in the Enthusiasts: Archive, to Archivistas Salvajes’ urgent preservation of Cuba’s endangered amateur cinema. Across disparate contexts, their projects foreground generosity, grassroots innovation, and collective authorship, tracing how portable technologies and independent networks have documented everyday life, ritual, labour and struggle.
On the occasion of Dr Ed Webb-Ingall’s (project director, LCVA) new publication BFI Screen Stories: The Story of British Video Activism, which “reveals the grassroots radicalism of generations of video activists who put cameras in the hands of campaigners and marginalised groups to equip them to challenge authority and fight for tangible change,” here is an open conversation with Dr Ed Webb-Ingall, Eileen Simpson and Fabio M. Quintero Perez to explore the politics and possibilities of preservation. Bringing together artists, archivists and researchers working with amateur and community moving image, the discussion will consider how archives can operate not simply as repositories of the past, but as active sites of exchange and public memory.
This event is available with the OCDF Bundle at Rich Mix: 6 events for £30.
Dr Ed Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker and researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He is a co-founder and project director of the London Community Video Archive is the author of BFI Screen Stories: The Story of British Video Activism. Previous solo exhibitions include, Three Rivers (2025), Peer (2024), Grand Union, Devonshire Collective (both 2023) ; South London Gallery (2019); Focal Point (2018). Group exhibitions include Brent Biennial (2022); MK Gallery, Invisible Dust (both 2019). He is a senior lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Eileen Simpson is an artist that works at the intersection of art, music and information networks. Her ongoing project Open Music Archive, in collaboration with artist Ben White, is an initiative to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings and a vehicle for collaborative projects. Eileen is currently a Reader in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art and Design. Between 2003-4 she was assistant to artists Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings on their research into the existence and remnants of amateur film clubs in socialist Poland. The resulting exhibition Enthusiasts opened at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in June 2004 – a public exhibition of the films and the cultures that made them. Subsequent versions of the exhibition, reconfigured as Enthusiasm, toured to the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, 1 April – 22 May 2005, Kunst Werke in Berlin, 5 June – 4 September 2005, and Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, 27 October 2005 – 15 January 2006.
Fabio M. Quintero Perez (Bejucal, Cuba, 1999) is a journalist, archivist with a Master’s degree in Film Curation from the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. He is the founder of the Archivistas Salvajes collective and a contributor to the Digital Encyclopedia of Cuban Audiovisual Media (ENDAC).
This event is supported by the British Council in partnership with the Independent Cinema Office.