Home>Final Report on the Volunteering Project at the National Film Archive of Thailand (NFA)

Final Report on the Volunteering Project at the National Film Archive of Thailand (NFA)

This volunteering project was started as an initiative by Ray Edmondson, the National Film Archive of Thailand, the Thai Film Foundation and myself. The main goal was professional development. The main areas I was involved with were preservation management, cataloguing, inspection standards, general guidelines and policy issues.

I had visited the archive in April 2004 for four days to find out what fields I could help with, if any. Due to the fact that this was the first time I had undertaken such a project, some of the goals and plans formulated were possibly overoptimistic, some did not match my qualifications well under the circumstances.

Last years__ discussions with some of the staff members about raising public awareness have certainly helped and unlike then, the archive participates and organizes public screenings on weekends now. Due to numerous reasons they only show dvd or vhs copies of their holdings, but it is a start. I went to a screening of NANG NAK (1999), a famous Thai ghost story that exists in over 20 versions. This latest version was one of the most successful films in Thai cinemas, beating even TITANIC in box office numbers. One member of the audience brought a home made vcd with excerpts from many other versions, scans of posters and programming notes. This was a good example of how the public involves itself. The Archive opened its Museum within the past year where some of the screenings are being held. Also the attendance of the workshop held at the premises of the archive on June 25th and 26th showed a general interest and concern for the problems of the institution. However, without knowing too much about the political climate in Thailand, I did get the impression that public pressure is not always a useful mean to better the situation of an institution. The ultimate success of the greater visibility of the archive remains to be seen, as does the success of the volunteering. Only by returning will we be able to know in what ways the volunteer actually does make a difference. This, amongst other things, will hopefully be the result of my next report on this ongoing long term project.

Author: Brigitte Paulowitz Filmarchivist. Worked at Haghefilm Laboratories in the Netherlands as Quality Controller, at the Austrian Film Museum as Head of the Archive, and at the German Filminstitute as Researcher. Student at the L Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in Rochester, USA in 2000-2001. Intense movie goer since the mid 80s, preferably silent and/or Asian cinema. 

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5