My connection with the Digital Film Archive has been through various roles, including Belfast Film Festival curation and other projects. One of these was through Wanda, a feminist film festival co-directed by myself and Dr Laura O’Connor. It was through this that we explored what the archive meant for female representation in Northern Ireland, and we re-edited the material to make Girls, which highlights how sexist language pervades society and media, but also shows how open the DFA is to casting a critical eye over our history.

After that, in the autumn of 2020, I started a research PhD on the first ten years of Ulster Television. Living in Belfast, I was unable to travel to my London university, any libraries, archives or to PRONI, which houses the physical UTV archive. Even if I had been able to defy lockdown and get to these institutions, they were all themselves closed and access to their contents was impossible.

I went to online sessions with fellow academic researchers whose projects had come to an abrupt halt. There were archaeologists whose digs in Greece had been postponed indefinitely and others whose interview subjects were elderly and now inaccessible through fear of infection. No one could access the archives they so badly needed for research. Over it all was a growing sense of frustration and panic that nothing was moving forward and nothing could be done about it.

But all was not lost. Fortunately, I had received a hard drive by courier from the DFA. Support from the Broadcast Authority of Ireland meant they had already begun the process of digitising a huge amount of UTV material from the 1960s. I spent the first months of the PhD pouring over the clips, beautifully transferred from the original 16mm film. It was fascinating to see vox pop interviews on the streets of Belfast, surprising opinions set against the backdrop of our architectural heritage. There’s also the shipyards, rural life, pop culture, UTV’s staff and offices looking like the height of 20th century modernity, and so much more. A lot of material has subsequently made its way in some form into my curation at the Belfast Film Festival, including Vox Populi, an installation in the Bank of Ireland building on Royal Avenue.

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of what we have in this publicly accessible resource. Alongside the aesthetics of the past and our undervalued social history lie facts, events, details and clues for present-day viewers to make sense of the history we share in this part of the world. It’s not just nostalgia, it’s how we got where we are as a society. With the archive’s current collecting of new material, it will eventually reveal how we get to where we are in the future. 

I, for one, will keep watching.