Conference Report: FIAF Symposium: Women, Cinema, and Film Archives

A report on the 2023 International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) Symposium held in Mexico City. The symposium’s theme was “Women, Cinema, and Film Archives,” and the event included presentations by archivists, curators, and scholars on women’s leadership in international film archives, the history of women’s participation in FIAF, and current initiatives in feminist archiving and curation. Still, much work remains to be done. We must ask broader questions about how gender has informed collecting, curating, and cataloging practices; how gender shapes women’s ideas about their own labor; and how histories of cinema are transformed by including women’s work at all levels as filmmakers, film laborers, and film archivists.