Archive Projects

Archival Assembly – Festival about international film archives

Every two years, Archival Assembly offers a new lens through which to view international film archives as living spaces to shape the future of cinema. The festival took place for the first time in September 2021 as the conclusion of the “Archive außer sich” project. In June 2023, Archival Assembly #2 focused on the concept of “Accidental Archivism”, and in 2024 it will be about the importance of sound and language in archiving international film history.

Archival Assembly Festival

The Fifth Wall
In the framework of “Archival Assembly #1” the digital archive “The Fifth Wall” was launched. The online archive brings together films, reports, announcements, texts, letters, and photos by the filmmaker and editor Navina Sundaram, from her more than 40 years of work in television. The focal point here is Sundaram, a writer with a journalistic approach to her work: on internationalism and decolonization, on questions of class, racism, immigration, and on Indian and German politics. Extracted from the archives of the NDR and WDR as well as from Sundaram’s private archive, “The Fifth Wall” is a curated look at German migration and media history. (Until now, available in German only.)
Yugantar online!
Yugantar was India’s first feminist film collective. Founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Baiya, Navroze Contractor and Meera Rao in 1980, the collective developed four films. All of them were digitally restored by Arsenal in recent years. Furthermore, a website dedicated to the collective’s work was developed to make the films available online.