Membership Information

Categories of Affiliaton

There are two categories of FIAF Affiliates: Members and Associates.

The Members (85 in 2006) are archives whose principal object of activity is the: collecting, cataloguing, preservation, providing access to and restoring of films and related documents. Members must satisfy the following conditions: they shall be bound in all official activities by the Code of Ethics, which implies that they must not make any commercial use of their films; the preservation of films must be one of the archive's main activities, which requires specialized equipment and facilities, specialized professional staffing, as well as the holding and the manufacturing of preservation masters. But the Federation encourages them to pursue all activities which provide a real cultural dimension to their institution: projection and viewing of films, using copies specially made for this purpose, running a cinema library, publishing books, periodicals and programmes, collecting and exhibiting museum objects relating to cinema. Legally, Members have a range of different statutes: government institutions, foundations, private associations, museums, universities. This flexibility derives from FIAF's history which has seen the convergence of very diverse initiatives in pursuit of the common ideal : film preservation.

The Associates (56 in 2006) are non profit institutions that have significant preservation programs in areas related with film preservation (moving image museums, television and video archives, documentation centers, etc...) or non profit institutions that hold major collections of prints and support the goals of film preservation, but may have limited or no film preservation programs. Specialized archives of various kinds would typically be Associates. Associates must endorse and uphold the principles expressed in the FIAF Code of Ethics.

Other Institutions and individual persons who feel committed to the preservation and dissemination of the audio-visual heritage and that are not eligible for affiliation with FIAF (film museums, corporations, laboratories, study centres, researchers, etc.) might join and support FIAF as an external adherent and become a FIAF Donors.