12/03/2025 - Bergamo Film Meeting, FEMA La Rochelle, the Midnight Sun Film Festival and Summer Film School are joining forces on a new initiative celebrating archive films and cinematic heritage

l-r: Arnaud Dumatin (FEMA La Rochelle), Fiammetta Girola (Bergamo Film Meeting), Milja Mikkola (Midnight Sun Film Festival) and Jan Jílek (Summer Film School)

Bergamo Film Meeting (Italy), FEMA La Rochelle (France), the Midnight Sun Film Festival (Finland, founded in 1986 by Aki Kaurismäki and Mika Kaurismäki) and Summer Film School (SFS, Czech Republic) have joined forces, creating the Archive Film Festival Network (AFFN): a new festival network focusing on archive films and film heritage.

Supported by MEDIA, it will comprise a complex system of shared activities covering different fields related to the presentation of archive films. This will include a shared programme section (called AFFN Presents), restored movies presented at festivals, plus year-long activities (AFFN Film), educational programmes (AFFN Education) and industry initiatives (AFFN Industry).

“This opens up new possibilities for our festival. It is a big challenge and a project that puts Summer Film School on the map of relevant European film festivals,” said the Czech event’s Jan Jílek. “The majority of titles screened at SFS can be defined as archive films, which is a unique feature among Eastern European festivals. As a network coordinator, we have come up with the idea and decided to connect with our friends from three other festivals similar to ours. We are sure that the AFFN will result in more extensive cooperation among us, and it will allow us to create special programmes dedicated to archive films and film heritage in various fields.”

“AFFN gives us a chance to formulate what we have been doing informally for years,” added Midnight Sun Film Festival’s Milja Mikkola, noting: “Shared activities will result in a database that other festivals will be allowed to benefit from.”

During its first year, the network will focus on “the complexities of the private and public sphere in mid-1970s cinema”. It will also redistribute Jacques Demy’s classic musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in the Czech Republic, France, Italy and Finland. Each network festival will also offer an industry programme, discussing the circulation and programming of archive films in a contemporary festival context.

In the past, SFS has focused on the Cinema of Moral Anxiety; it has also shown silent films and held retrospectives of Luis Buñuel and Poland’s Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Bergamo Film Meeting has celebrated the work of Márta Mészáros and Agnès Varda as well as Costa-Gavras and Lauren Bacall.

FEMA La Rochelle has held retrospectives of Roberto Rossellini, Bulgarian director Binka Zhelyaskova, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Asta Nielsen, among others, while Midnight Sun has introduced its viewers to 90-year-old Finnish films, Croatian cinema in the 1960s and mid-century Hungarian animation.

“AFFN is a fantastic opportunity to strengthen and multiply the work and commitment we have been cultivating for many years: the promotion and circulation of archive films,” said Arnaud Dumatin, of FEMA La Rochelle. Each of the festivals has already been underlining the importance of film history and screening archive titles to its audience. Now, they will be able to “deepen” such cooperation, state the founders.

“The four festival members share the same vision for cinema, the same desire for support and the same goal to make our network an educational tool. It’s a network that also offers a space for confrontation and debates among its members, and constitutes an enriching benchmark for practices, as we don’t all work in a similar way,” observed Dumatin.

As underlined by its founders, AFFN has a “clear system of network management, including a detailed deal memo and guidelines”, and has also adopted a common strategy regarding gender balance and environmental sustainability.