On the final day of EFM DocSalon 2026 (Archive Day), EURODOC director Nora Philippe presented her recently completed Producers’ Roadmap of Decolonial and Ethical Uses of Archive in Documentary.
Four years in the making, the wide-ranging set of guidelines is intended for use by filmmakers, producers, archival producers, film funds, archives, commissioning editors. The Roadmap is divided into six chapters, ranging from Colonial Archive & Mental Health; The Future of Our Footage; Archival Meaning & Accountability Demands; Countering the Market; Archive & Cultural Sovereignty & Ownership, and the Function of End Credits as spaces of accountability.
“We’ve been thinking about this roadmap for years, and it’s the first time we are [presenting] it,” said Philippe during her Berlin address. “We tried at first to map what was already existing in our landscape, and we realised that there were not so many pledges and manifestos regarding ethical access to archives. The ones that had been issued and pronounced over the last years had been completely forgotten or ‘invisibilised,’ but we still found many documents that were of great interest to us filmmakers in the realm of archivists.”
The “invisibilised” studies Philippe uncovered included the Liberate the Image Manifesto (edited by the Dox Box collective, 2018-2019), the FIAF Declaration on Fair Use and Access (2007, ratified 2008), the International Council on Archives (ICA) Code of Ethics (September 4, 1996), Unesco’s Universal Declaration on Archives (UDA, November 2011), and many more besides. These studies were rarely acknowledged in the film industry, and more likely ignored (if folk ever knew of their existence in the first place).
Philippe points out that safeguards and ethically-driven guarantees are in place across most strata and sectors of the doc industry, but when it comes to archives, there is a distinct lack of regulation. She illustrated the dilemma during her Berlin presentation. “At EURODOC, our job is to train producers,” she said. “We have plenty of really useful and well-made sets of recommendations when it comes to parity, when it comes to diversity…we have sets of recommendations when it comes to sustainability, to environmental justice. We have ethics on the relationship to protagonists. So, we have plenty of resources of that type to work with as documentary filmmakers, but nothing has ever been done [on] archives.”
Some of the key findings of Philippe’s Roadmap include the recognition that whom you pay for archive use, what you pay for, and how you pay is political. “Careful consideration should be given before directing substantial resources toward commercial funds that offer standardized licensing agreements without sufficient commitment to provenance research, contextual integrity, or equitable access,” the report underlines.
What’s more, smaller, independently or community-curated collections may provide more ethically grounded alternatives and even, sometimes, the same material. By the same token, archival funds should understand their role as facilitators of access rather than exclusive owners of material.
Philippe underlines: “We cannot continue paying very large amounts of money to private funds which have no interest in research, in preserving world heritage and above all, in respecting the source and the context of the archive it sells. The decontextualization and commercial fragmentation of historical material exemplify the risks of purely market-driven logics.”
From a producer/rights holder perspective, he/she who has the biggest budget (and therefore the greatest purchasing power) is not necessarily “the most legitimate” party to access the archive. “In live-action documentary, criteria such as legitimacy, access, and cultural authenticity increasingly inform evaluation. These principles must apply equally to archive-based works,” the report says.
Another core recommendation concerns the engagement of the Global North with (hi)stories of the Global South. “The dissymmetry between archive available in the North and archive available in the South is extreme, and grounded in colonial history. Today, as a means of rebalancing, co-production with partners in the concerned country should be regarded as an ethical requirement. Such cooperation helps ensure that master files and archival copies remain accessible locally, and are part of the national or regional heritage, and that cultural sovereignty is respected,” Philippe underlines.
What’s more, a film’s end credits “should indicate that the production – and potentially the supporting institutions of the film – are open to receiving additional information concerning the archival materials used, not solely for legal risk mitigation, but as part of an ongoing commitment to research, transparency, and equity.”
One particularly homely piece of advice the report offers is for filmmakers to use archival material in the way they’d like to see their own films and footage used in the future. “The materials we produce today will, in time, constitute the archival record through which future generations interpret our present, and reinterpret the past,” Philippe stresses.
The EURODOC boss designed her Roadmap in association with many experts in the archive field, including Elizabeth Klinck, Nikolaus Perneczky, Anita Afonu, Alba Lombardía, Monika Preischl, Paul Seesequasis, Ania Szczepanska, Mila Turajlic and Laura Tusi.
“It is, per se, a work in progress, intended to evolve on a regular basis in dialogue with you,” Philippe signed off to the filmmakers and archive industry present at EFM.
Click here to read the full report.
