Angela Davis © SVT
You won’t find many bigger collections at DOK Leipzig Archive market than that of Sweden’s SVT Archives. It has over 400,000 hours of material in its vaults. Some of this is very recent. Some dates right back to the birth of cinema in 1896.
“We have a lot. It’s not just from Sweden but from all over the world actually,” says Maria Bergmark, Archive Sales Executive (due to attend the DOK Leipzig’s Archive Market for the first time this year).
SVT is the Swedish national public state-controlled television broadcaster. As Bergmark points out, in the 1960s and 1970s SVT correspondents were scattered all over the world, diligently reporting on political, social and military upheavals wherever they were happening. That’s why the archive has plenty of material of everything from the Vietnam War to military coups in South America. These events were happening a long way from Sweden but SVT reporters were always on top of them.
The broadcaster may have launched in the mid-50s but the archival holdings stretch back far further than that.
Like archives elsewhere, SVT experienced a spike in sales during the pandemic. “We were all working from home for one and a half years but we could manage to deliver footage anyway..and we had a lot to do!”
Bergmark is expecting brisk business in the coming months. The Swedish king, Carl XVI Gustaf, will be celebrating 50 years on the throne next year and local documentary makers have been coming out in force to mark the event with new films about him.
There is always interest as well in material relating to the Nobel prize. SVT has plenty of footage dealing with the awards (although the Nobel committee took over the rights to the prizes in 2003). Japanese buyers are always keen on this, especially when there are Japanese Nobel laureates to celebrate.
The collection also has large amounts of documentaries – this this has always been an area in which SVT has invested heavily.
Bergmark has been working at the archives since 2006 – and some of her colleagues have been there for even longer. (Previously, she was in an administrative job at the broadcaster but leapt at the chance to join the archive team).
In Leipzig, she and her colleagues will be looking to network as well as to sell. Travel is an important part of their business. They attend certain other trade events but also spend time whenever possible visiting clients aboard.
Thankfully, the 400,000 hours in the SVT archives have almost all been digitised. So, no, Bergmark and her team don’t have to disappear down into vast catacombs full of cans of old film. “It is so much easier than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” the archive sales exec sighs as she remembers the old analogue days.
The SVT archivists will look to help young creative filmmakers who don’t have huge resources. “Yes, of course, we will do that. It depends on what rights they are interested in, of course, but we always try to meet them.”
License fees are calculated on a case by case basis which takes into account the nature of the project, the length of footage needed and the rights requested (media and platforms, territory, license period). License fees are usually on a per minute basis.
Gems for film lovers within the collection include Ingmar Bergman’s much heralded version of Mozart’s, The Magic Flute, many interviews with Bergman himself as well as several of his documentaries, and rare archive footage of Greta Garbo from 1935. On the music front, you’ll find Miles Davis and Elton John concert footage. When it comes to politics and news, everything from the US Civil Rights protested to Lech Walesa in the Polish shipyards in the early 1980s is included.
How many of the 400,000 hours in the collection has Bergmark actually watched herself? She laughs at the question. “I don’t know…a lot. And sometimes when you’re searching for material, you can get so fascinated with what we have,” she says of how she too can become obsessed with what she is watching. There have been many times when she and her team have received outlandish requests for material she thinks can’t possibly be in the archive. Then she looks and sure enough there will be relevant film available.
For example, SVT has footage of the 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm when the four hostages who were taken captive ended up championing their captors. This was the case which led to the coining of the term, the “Stockholm syndrome.”
Like other similar organisations, SVT is committed to curbing piracy – increasingly commonplace in the YouTube era. The company has a department which deals with copyright breaches.
“This is like a test for us…hopefully we will come back,” Bergmark says of the DOK Leipzig event which she sees as a strong networking opportunity. Around 60% of SVT’s archive sales are to local Swedish customers. The aim now is to let the rest of the world know that this is a truly international collection with footage from every corner of the globe.
“We are hoping to meet with lots of new customers of course,” Bergmark explains how being in Leipzig should boost the Swedish archive’s international profile.
