Archival Lenses film festival

Date: 30th June, 9:30am – 7:00pm
Location: School of Digital Arts cinema

Book a FREE ticket via Eventbrite here.

Media and Digital Culture research group present ‘Archival Lenses’ – a one-day film festival that explores the creative and critical possibilities of the archive. The event will showcase short films, curated conversations and research projects produced by Manchester Metropolitan University artists and scholars. Through screenings and dialogue, ‘Archival Lenses’ explores how creative practice creates opportunities for archives to be re-interpreted, remixed, and challenged.

Schedule
09:30 – 10:00 – Refreshments

10:00 – 11:30 – Chris Paul Daniels (Give Yourself a Round of Applause) and North West Film Archive (Unshown Treasures)
Unshown Treasures
Staff at the North West Film Archive have hand-picked some rarely-seen delights from its wonderful and varied collection for your enjoyment. Look behind the scenes of a Radio One roadshow, ride on vintage transport on the Isle of Man, join Coronation Street autograph-hunters as they await the elusive Emily Bishop, meet “Dr When” courtesy of a Burnley cine club and be mesmerised by a compilation of water-damaged film images. Just some of the 9 films submitted to this eclectic mix.

Give yourself a round of applause by Chris Paul Daniels (2026, 15.25 mins) focuses on staged performance, illusion, the mechanics of storytelling, and how identities are constructed, rehearsed and mythologised. The use of the performative North West Film Archive material doubles as a search for an authentic internal voice.
Original score by Raz Ullah. Voice performed by Afrodeutsche.
Originally commissioned and exhibited by Lowry (Salford, UK) as part of Curtain Up, 18th April – 21st June, 2026.

11:45 – 13:15 – Maria Ruban (Everything We Did)
Everything We Did was a 12-hour karaoke event of Everything I Do by Bryan Adams and was streamed across MMU’s School of Digital Arts in Autumn 2024. The event was based on newspapers, magazines, media footage and testimony from a specific period of 1991 when the hit song was No1 for a record 16 weeks. During this time period there was also the collapse of the USSR, with Ukraine declaring independence. The accompanying exhibition featured films from NWFA and images from Bolton Archives. Artists were Maria Ruban and John Lloyd.

13:15 – 14:00 – Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 – Sian McFarlane (We Are Illuminated), Rachel Genn and Debbie Ballin (BATTLEDRESS)
We Are Illuminated by Sian McFarlance (2017)

A film charting the leisure life of Walsall, centring on a 1951 script, ‘The Pageant of Walsall’, first performed in the Town Hall as the finale to Walsall’s Festival of Britain celebrations in 1951. Charting events and characters from Walsall’s history, from its origins as Wealshall in AD 916 to 1900, extracts from the play are re-enacted by local students. Archival materials recalling pageantry, flower parades, carnival queens, and a history of cinemas, fairs, and park illuminations, accessible just under the surface of present-day Walsall.

BATTLEDRESS is an immersive two screen documentary and a collaboration between writer Dr Rachel Genn, (Manchester Writing School) filmmaker Debbie Ballin, (School of Digital Arts) and The North-West Film Archive.

BATTLEDRESS builds bridges between writers, filmmakers and archives, developing novel ways of understanding history through notions of entanglement. Inspired by Genn’s personal story, ‘Streetfighting Girls’ written in 2021 for the New Statesman about the socio-economic pressures on young women in 1980s Sheffield.

The research offers alternative histories of fashion, fighting and allegiance in the North of England in the 1980’s and 90’s illuminating the class and gender entanglements motivating female violence. Oral testimonies from working class writers are layered alongside a remixed archive dreamscape of nights out in Northern Cities in the 1980’s and 90’s to create an immersive conversation that aerates and amplifies personal narratives from marginalized working-class women’s writers and engender a visceral audience ‘encounter’ with their teenage experiences.

15:45 – 17:15 – LGBTQIA+ History in the North West Film Archive
As part of a project funded by the BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund, the North West Film Archive, in partnership with local Community Interest Company, Cinema Nation, has curated a selection of LGBTQIA+ content from our collection. LGBTQIA+ History in the Archive spans over 65 years of local history, celebrating queer lives, activism, joy, creativity, and community across the North West, including Merseyside.

The showcase includes:

• Footage from Liverpool’s first Vogue Ball and Liverpool Pride, capturing the region’s vibrant queer culture.
• Rare historic film of early LGBTQIA+ social spaces in Liverpool city centre.
• Contemporary short films on inclusive grassroots communities, such as queer skateboarding groups and community pride celebrations.
• Moving stories of activism, protest, drag artistry, intergenerational reflections, and everyday queer life from the 1960s to today.

17:30 – 19:00 – Sian Williams (BODY/LAND)
BODY/LAND (2026) 88mins, directed by Siân A. Williams, is an experimental documentary developed through NWCDTP-supported research, featuring care-led practices of audiovisual archive remix, interviews and collaborative performances.

The film features the home movies of Paul Berry, who was an Oscar-nominated animator, whose personal Super 8 collection is a sadly rare example of queer domestic life in film archive collections. Supported by research at the North West Film Archive, these moments of queer joy, chosen family, rural trips, and celebrations are reimagined alongside other regional film collections to a newly composed original score featuring both Siân A. Williams and Katie Chatburn.

Five portraits of specially featured artists, Janina Sabaliauskaite, Avadrian Night, E.M. Parry, Ro Robertson, and Snuggle Ninja, discuss narratives that reflect how queer and trans creatives understand themselves, their histories, and their representation in relation to environment and landscape. These interventions weave through each artist’s practice in photography, spoken word, performance, sculpture and music, moving towards an expansive language of BODY(s) and LAND(s).