German archive doyenne Monika Preischl guides Business Doc Europe through what has come to be known as Archive Day at DOK Leipzig, when the German and European libraries gather to entice filmmakers towards their collections, and when the doc industry meets to interrogate the archive business, its practices and ethics. But first, she offers a corrective…
Archive is the heartbeat of documentary, offering up images that are arresting in their ability to illustrate great documentary and film works, and irrefutable in terms of their direct link to the history that is being portrayed. This is a maxim of doc, and something that is plainly beyond dispute, yes? Well…no.
“I think what you call aesthetic purity is really the sense that archive is untouched: that it shows us the past directly, without anyone in between. That feeling is powerful, but it’s also a bit of an illusion,” Preischl puts BDE firmly in its place. “Every archive image was mediated from the start: someone chose what to film and how, someone decided what to keep, and someone described and catalogued it. So the purity isn’t in the image itself. It lies in its integrity as a historical document, in the connection between what we see and how it came into being.”
“And that’s exactly what’s under threat,” she warns. “When footage is taken out of context, when the people in it never consented, or when AI alters or fabricates images that look completely authentic, the sense of purity remains, but the document behind it is gone. So rather than asking how pure archive looks, we should ask how it came into being, what story it tells, and what new stories can grow out of it.”
Archive Day 2026 offers up a smorgasbord of nourishing and tasty morsels for docmaker consumption. First off, from 10am, the Doc Archive market enables the likes of Bundesarchiv, Getty Images, Sky UK and SVT, and many others, to show off their footage and stills collections with the intention of forging connections with the filmmakers in tow.
“I think the continuity of the Archive Market speaks for itself,” Preischl tells BDE. “Archives clearly want direct exchange with the film industry, and meeting in person simply leads to better communication. Aren’t we all drowning in information and spending much of our time sorting through it? Talking face to face cuts through that, and it’s still far more inspiring to meet real people than to communicate with AI bots. For the archives, the market also offers a low-threshold way to meet and exchange with one another, and our programme is designed to bring all these levels together.”
“That said, I’d see the market less as a place to close deals and more as a place for exchange, visibility and building trust,” Preischl adds. “Archives don’t usually go home with signed contracts, but with insight into current projects and where the industry is heading. And filmmakers discover material they would never have thought of. I’m still surprised every time by the treasures some archives hold.”
The subsequent discussions promise to embrace a broad range of topics of immediate concern to the archive and documentary industries.
The ‘Replatforming – AI and Its Ethics for Archives, Producers and Archive Researchers’ panel discussion, moderated by filmmaker Lucie Králová, will acknowledge that AI is shaping our world and influences how filmmakers find and use archival footage. But archives hold real-life stories, not just data. Why is every AI decision, from archive to edit suite, an ethical one?
Archive Producer Elizabeth Klinck will pick up the AI baton as she moderates the panel titled ‘Is There a Red Line? – AI in Documentary Filmmaking.’ When is an archive image still documentary, and will the next generation still care whether it’s real? Is the question she and panelists will seek to answer. During the session, GRAP (German Researchers and Archive Producers) brings the latest from Footage Fest New York and the US, where the Archive Producers Association has issued first guidelines.
Archive Producer Solveig Hansen will give a keynote that will outline the basics of licensing music for docs. Who actually owns a song and which rights do filmmakers need? The talk will provide a practical introduction to publishing, master and synchronization rights and explain what happens when licences expire. It will also take a closer look at supposedly “royalty-free” music and some of the most common misconceptions surrounding music licensing. Finally, Solveig will take a brief look at current developments around AI-generated music and what they could mean for filmmakers.
The DOK Talk: Kino und Kampf will demonstrate how a large number of analogue prints of the films of the revolutionary Latin American cinema of the 1960s/70s can be found in the Arsenal archive and the Federal Archives. The paths they took to get there also give an account of collaborations between East and West German film festivals, distributors and archives despite the Iron Curtain.
“Through concrete case studies, we look at ethically sensitive archive material and talk with filmmakers about the choices they make when working with it,” Preischl sums up the day’s smart content. “We ask how archives describe their holdings and whose perspective those descriptions reflect, and present an AI-based tool that helps filmmakers ask the right questions before using material, developed as part of a research project at the Prague film school FAMU. And we take on AI directly: when original archive footage is altered with AI, where does restoration end and fabrication begin, is there a red line, and what transparency do we owe the audience?”
As seems somewhat evident, life is not always plain-sailing in the oceans of doc and archive, and Preischl pinpoints areas of best practice in order to find calmer waters. “This year has been shaped by problems with financing, funding and cost cutting across the entire film industry, and nobody has been spared,” Preischl points out. “Archives in particular are short-staffed and the workload is enormous: they receive more and more requests, and productions often don’t get back to them. So if I had to name one best practice, it would be good and reliable communication. Telling an archive clearly what you’re looking for, keeping them informed and closing the loop when a project changes direction makes a real difference.”
“At the same time, one problem has become more pressing than in previous years: in Germany, there is still no access to the ARD and ZDF broadcast archives, and it has actually become harder. The commercial subsidiaries of the public broadcasters simply can’t provide the intensive, time-consuming database research that’s often needed, so we end up with access to less material. It’s high time, if not overdue, for Germany’s public broadcasters to grant professional filmmakers in particular a right to information,” she demands.
That said, Preischl’s working year thus far has been satisfying and highly productive. “This year I was lucky to have two wonderful projects come out in cinemas. During this summer’s extreme heat, the cinema worked as a safe place, quite literally a cooling place, and audiences came.”
The first was Ingeborg Bachmann – Jemand, der einmal ich war, directed by Regina Schilling for the 100th anniversary of Bachmann’s birth, a poetic portrait weaving together scenes with Sandra Hüller, archive material, interviews and Bachmann’s own texts. The second was Was haben wir gelacht by Eva Müller and Isabel Schneider, which tells the story of German entertainment television of the 1990s and early 2000s for the first time from a female perspective.
“Beyond production work, I teach at film schools, give seminars and workshops, and support projects close to my heart that have no budget, simply by sharing my know-how,” she adds. “And after twenty years of hands-on archive work, I’m increasingly devoting myself to research questions around the use of Nazi-era film heritage.”
Back in 2024, the Bundesarchiv opened up its entire archive from the 2WW to filmmakers, for a nominal fee. Yes, for many years, the German government had sold its Nazi-era film heritage at top prices through its own federally owned licensing company, which was why the 2024 volte face seemed so remarkable.
“Unfortunately, the Bundesarchiv’s approach is still rather unique in Europe,” Preischl laments. “In Spain, for example, my experience is that footage from the Franco era is licensed at extremely high prices, which makes it very hard to tell that history. And if you can’t afford it, the story simply doesn’t get told. Why largely publicly funded archives follow an agency logic, selling material from fascist and inhumane dictatorships at top prices, is a scandal in my view.”
