IX Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference “Exploring the Past and Future of Audiovisual Media in the Baltic Sea Region: Archives, Digital Platforms, Researchers and Spectators”
From 6-8 June 2024 at the cinema K.Suns (Elizebetes Str. 83/85) will be held the IX Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference. The conference is an annual international event that offers a platform for discussions on the past and present of film culture of the Baltic Sea Region. The first conference took place in 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia, but from 2019 the conference became mobile, now alternating between three Baltic countries. In 2024 it will return to Riga for the second time, and will be hosted by the Latvian Academy of Culture, Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council, and LAC Riga Film Museum. The IX conference will address a dual, interrelated focus: the histories of audiovisual collections within the region, and the burgeoning impact of digital technologies on facilitating access to these collections.
In the wake of digital technologies, films from diverse historical periods and regions as well as contemporary cinema have become globally accessible to an unprecedented extent. This digital turn has significantly influenced the operations of archives, museums, and libraries – traditionally the custodians of (national) audiovisual collections. From the perspective of access, it has transformed these repositories from entities with specific physical and administrative boundaries into increasingly open digital platforms, serving researchers, filmmakers, the media industry, and general audiences alike.
Film and media scholars, archivists, and students from the Baltic and Nordic countries, USA, and other countries, will be addressing the questions about the origins of audiovisual collections in the Baltic Sea Region and the influence of changing political formations and legal frameworks (among them, cases of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia); the impact of digitization and the availability of audiovisual archives on the platforms on the film narratives; the influence of changing viewing formats and location on the consumption of contemporary cinema and film heritage; the aspects of AI, and other subjects. The keynote presenters will be film scholar Dr Jaimie Baron from UC Berkeley (USA), the director of the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia Eva Näripea, and Deputy Head of the Digitization Department at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents Madara Didrihsone.
The conference is organized by the Latvian Academy of Culture, Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council, and LAC Riga Film Museum in cooperation with the Film Archive of the Estonian National Archives, the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and Media education and research centre Meno avilys.
The full programme is available at the conference’s website: https://www.balticfilmhistory.org/. Conference language – English.
A paper presented at the conference will be considered for Paper in Baltic Cinema Award, which recognizes academic papers on the Baltic Sea Region cinema submitted for the conference based on the originality, scholarship excellence, and quality of engagement with the subject area. 400 Eur award is initiated by the co-organizers of the VIII Baltic Sea Region Film Conference and Media education and research centre Meno avilys (Lithuania) and Audiovisual works copyright association AVAKA (Lithuania).
The conference is part of the project “Cultural and creative ecosystem of Latvia as a resource for resilience and sustainability”/CERS (No. VPP-MM-LKRVA-2023/1-0001), funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia in the framework of the National Research Programme “Latvian Culture – a Resource for National Development” (2023-2026). The National Research Programme is administered by the Latvian Council of Science.