UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee Award
Researcher: Miguel Errazu
Supervisor: Lee Douglas

From the 1970s to the 1980s, international organizations and western NGOs promoted film training workshops and media transference projects in peripheral countries. Through cooperation for development projects, film workshops sought to address global inequalities in culture and communication. However, globalization defined the material infrastructures and transnational networks with which these projects had to negotiate. "Frictions" between local and global agendas shaped the resulting films, but also their later circulation and archival conservation. My project tackles this issue through the study, reactivation and restitution of a hitherto lost archive of one of these film workshops: the Miners Film Workshop of Bolivia (1983). Promoted by a French NGO and a Bolivian mining union, it is one of the earliest experiences of transnational cooperation through film training workshops in Latin America, and the first to take place in Bolivia. Films produced in this workshop were soon neglected and lost in Bolivia, while remained unnoticed in French archives. Relevant and extensive documentation now available allows for an in-depth approach to this workshop, for which interdisciplinary and self-reflexive methodologies will be mobilized. Drawing on film history and theory, ethnography and film preservation studies, the project brings its contribution to current scholarly efforts to map transnational film cultures by situating film workshops in peripheral countries as key sites of North-South cultural cooperation in the 1980s. In addition, this project calls for restitution. Accordingly, it is designed as a counter-archive, relying on digital practices to preserve its neglected memories. A digital archive will make accessible all films and related materials produced through the action in an online platform. In this manner, I will reactivate and restitute the complexity of material determinations, entangled memories and ambiguous cultural legacies of the Miners Film Workshop.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39183