In her address, President Virginia Bazán Gil explained why the Federation chose São Paulo. “Bringing the World Conference to Latin America is a deliberate choice”, she stated. It allows the community to listen to different conversations, discover different professional realities and connect with communities that are not always sufficiently present in its usual discussions.

For FIAT/IFTA, she said, diversity is not simply a matter of counting countries, institutions or professional profiles. It is about what happens when those differences actually enter the conversation. That exchange has to work in both directions: local and regional perspectives can shape how we think about global challenges, while the knowledge and connections of an international network can support initiatives at a local level.

The opening session was followed by the first keynote, delivered by Michela Giorelli, TV Executive Producer at Vicoforte Media Productions. Drawing on more than thirty years of work across Latin America, she offered a producer’s perspective on the relationship between archives and documentary storytelling.

Finding archival material, she showed, is only the beginning: visibility is not access. Rights, availability, quality, timing and cost all determine whether material can actually return to the screen, and can ultimately shape the story itself.

Her keynote also followed that relationship in the other direction. Every production creates new archival material, such as interviews, rushes, research and unused footage, that needs to remain findable, understandable and usable if it is to become part of tomorrow’s audiovisual memory. It was a powerful reflection on the continuum between producing with archives and producing for the archive: what we film today is someone else’s archive tomorrow.