Leading filmmakers, archivists, editors, copyright experts and archive producers on how to work with archive material in your practice. 

An Ecstatic Experience © Ja'Tovia Gary (2015)

The Archives for Education and Make Film History projects make available over 300 films from the BFI National Archive, BBC Archive, Northern Ireland Screen, the Irish Film Institute and London Community Video Archive for creative reuse by emerging filmmakers in schools, film training and higher education across the UK and Ireland.

Following a successful pilot at Kingston University in 2017 led by filmmaker and academic Dr. Shane O’Sullivan, these films are now available to emerging filmmakers and educators in the UK and Ireland through educational licensing agreements with our project partners. Films licensed by the LCVA may be used subject to their Terms of Use.

Once licensed by an educational institution, over 300 archive films can be downloaded by tutors for use in the classroom, on campus or online. Students watch the films on our platform, choose an archive film to respond to and download up to ten films a year to reuse in their work, integrating clips of up to 2 minutes into their own projects.

Over 100 higher education institutions, film festivals and training organisations have signed up to the scheme. You can watch showreels featuring short clips of some of the films available below and follow the project @makefilmhistory on X.

Click here to sign up or contact Dr. Shane O’Sullivan with any questions.

Credits: Film stills and summaries used on this site are adapted with permission from the BFI Player, BBC iPlayer, IFI Player, NI Screen Digital Film Archive and the BBC and LCVA websites. They retain the copyright of these archives and any third-party rights holders. Film clips included in the showreels are streamed with the permission of the BFI and BBC.