Film and TV Society: Archive Officer

Dear members

My name is Pedro Tafur and I’m a third-year Media student. Here you can see a picture of me during the first COVID lockdown which I spent watching movies in Madrid.

When I moved to London, at the end of high school, I had the privilege of living in a 16th-century house that was frequently used for film shoots and events.  During my time there, I volunteered to digitalize the photographic archive of the family’s albums. This experience led me to develop an interest in archiving and the crucial task of making our past accessible in digital formats.

Ever since 1941, members of the UCL Film and TV have been making student productions and capturing the history of London and UCL through film. From the first Women’s Liberation March to the early works of Harry Bradbeer and Christopher Nolan, our archive has a unique historical value. 

With the support from the Union and Film Soc alumni, we now have the opportunity to restore all our 16mm films into digital copies. But before we can digitalize our films, we need to move them into a new storage room outside the third floor of the Bloomsbury Gym where they’re currently kept.

With every summer that goes by the film continues to degrade, and years of our history get irrevocably lost.

If I’m elected for the role of Archive officer, I will work so our archive becomes accessible to any Film Soc member. The goals are clear: recover our past, bring our films home, and get out of that Gym. 

Thank you for your trust

Pedro