The Archive Stares Back: Reflections on the Archival Lenses Film Festival

On June 30, 2026, MMU’s Media and Digital Culture Research Group held its first-ever film festival at the School of Digital Arts (SoDA) cinema. Archival Lenses, the inspiration-packed day of screenings and discussions held in partnership with the North West Film Archive (NWFA), was organised by the research group’s sub-cluster of the same name.

On the day, the artists, practitioners and scholars of the group explored the questions that connect them in the company of a sold-out audience. Starting with: what happens when archival footage steps off its hidden shelf to be rediscovered, reintegrated, remixed or reinvented?

The day’s programme brought together original films created wholly or in-part from archival footage, alongside themed selections drawn directly from the NWFA’s trove of professional, amateur and home video, chosen and compiled by NWFA staff for the occasion.

As filmmaker and Archival Lenses member Chris Paul Daniels put it, “If you look in the archive, the archive stares back at you.” This idea ran through the whole programme; that an archive is a living body of material, waiting to return something to the person who examines it, rather than a fixed store of film reels, waiting to be forgotten.

The works on show were too varied to sort into tidy categories, and most of them offered more than one perspective on archival footage, even in a single moment. Across the screenings and discussions, however, a number of key focal points emerged.

Focal Point: Archive as Portal

Several of the works used the archive as a way to travel back to a particular moment and, from there, to look again at the present.

Take Everything We Did by Archival Lenses member and filmmaker Maria Ruban. Ruban’s work documents a 12-hour karaoke event with only one song on the playlist: Bryan Adams’s “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”. The song spent sixteen weeks at number one in 1991, during which time the Soviet Union was breaking apart, and Ukraine, where Ruban’s family is from, declaring independence. By tying the end of a superpower to a song most people would rather forget, Ruban’s work turns a piece of chart trivia into a doorway—one that leads back both to a strange and consequential year, and to the filmmaker’s own family history.

The same instinct appeared in one of the day’s smaller touches: a half-finished prize crossword Ruban had rescued from an old issue of Smash Hits, passed around for the audience to complete. It stood as an ordinary scrap of the past that opened its historic world into yours, inviting you into dialogue with it.

Siân Williams’s feature-length documentary BODY/LAND worked in a similar spirit at greater length. Williams described the film as a collaborative practice between themself and the five LGBTQIA+ artists they interview, each exploring, in their own way, the idea of the body as landscape, as memory, as a body of work and of creation. Archival footage serves a double purpose: it opens a portal into each filmmaker’s subjective experience and understanding, and it works as a kind of poetic language, underpinning and deepening the discussions through immersion rather than illustration.

Focal Point: Archive as Mirror

A number of works turned the archive toward the self, or toward the people who came before.

Drawing on an essay she had first written for the New Statesman, Manchester Writing School’s Rachel Genn worked with Archival Lenses member and filmmaker Debbie Ballin to create BATTLEDRESS. The film sets footage of post-industrial 1980s Sheffield against Genn’s own memories of teenage nights out: the ritual of getting ready, the unpredictability of the evening, the occasional fight.

Genn described the process as an “excavation.” It brought to the surface what she called “the polyphonic personal,” the recognition that the person who lives an experience is not quite the person who later recounts it. Her background in neuroscience complements Ballin’s expertise in oral testimony, and the two developed interview techniques for other participants in the film that were designed to draw out “embodied memory”—their term for the physical and sensory detail that ordinary questioning tends to miss.

Earlier in the day, Chris Paul Daniels showed Give Yourself a Round of Applause, a dreamlike film originally commissioned by the Lowry. It is assembled entirely from remixed NWFA footage of performance and staging over the years, drawn from professional productions and home movies alike. Over the images runs a slow, poetic voiceover that moves through the idioms and metaphors of performance, reworking their wording until familiar phrases yield new meaning. The result treats the archive less as a record to be consulted than as raw material for reflection, an approach that surfaces, in Daniels’s own account, a search for authenticity and for joy.

Sian McFarlane’s We Are Illuminated, meanwhile, reflects a community, place and time caught mid-transition, between present moment and past. Drawing inspiration from a collection of 1950s pageant photographs held at Walsall Local History Centre—images of carnival queens, floats and fairground rides—the piece combines photography, archival footage and modern documentary techniques to trace the town’s story across decades. The result is a collage of overlapping voices, layered images and moments that reflect a community’s own myth-making back to it.

Focal Point: Archive as Party

For many, the word ‘archive’ conjures an image of dark and dusty shelves consigned to the past. Perhaps the most surprising and delightful discovery of Archival Lenses is that the archive knows how to party.

A compilation of light-hearted archival clips, compiled by NWFA staff as part of their ‘Unshown Treasures’ selection, made a point that is easy to overlook: the pursuit of fun is a serious part of ordinary life, and that leaves a trace in the record. Among the finds was footage of a Radio 1 roadshow, an eighties fashion show at the Workers’ Film Association in Hulme, and home movies by the late stop-motion animator Paul Berry.

The archive’s fun and games were particularly poignant in context. That Radio 1 roadshow reached the Lancashire coalfields three months into the Miners’ Strike, while Paul Berry’s holiday films with his chosen queer family were filmed at a time when homophobia was publicly sanctioned. A comparable weight ran through Ruban’s karaoke-based work—on the one hand, it’s a joyous and absurdist tribute to good times, on the other, a bittersweet celebration of the family she knows almost nothing of, lost to famine in Ukraine. In part, the piece became a space in which that absence could be held.

Focal Point: Archive as Protest

Some of the work used the archive to keep particular lives and struggles from disappearing.

A Workers’ Film Association film shared by NWFA followed the Palestinian dance troupe El-Funoun as they travelled to collect songs and stories from local communities during the 1980s. Its significance has grown since, as the original filmmakers have recently reconnected with the people on screen and are exploring whether the footage might be returned to them, in turn exemplifying preservation as cultural survival.

The same impulse to recover and connect through what the record overlooks ran through the day’s engagement with queer history. Siân Williams’ BODY/LAND was one expression of it; another was the programme’s LGBTQIA+ strand, developed by NWFA with the Liverpool-based organisation Cinema Nation, which worked in two directions at once. It surfaced direct records of queer life while reclaiming films that no one had previously read in that light. Its selections included footage of the 1988 Manchester rally against Section 28, which saw more than twenty thousand people filling the streets, as well as a promotional film for Liverpool’s Grand Vogue Ball. A consistent argument sat beneath the strand: that material surrounding an under-documented community is too readily dismissed as irrelevant, and that the proper response is to look again, reading the archive against its own catalogue.

Looking Back

If there’s one thing the films of Archival Lenses made clear, it’s that the archive comes to life when you investigate, disrupt, reimagine and reshare it. And importantly, the archive’s inherent imperfections and absences give us a way to begin that conversation.

NWFA’s Beth Thrasher-Jackson raised the point while describing the water-damaged films she loves, the kind most people would discard. Archival films, she suggested, are not only representations of the past, but also physical objects that have lived lives of their own. So, should we really be surprised if we find the archive staring back?