Archive and found footage have long been a key tool for documentary filmmakers, often combined with interviews and other narrative techniques to provide deeper context and act as a visual aid.
More recently, filmmakers have been reimagining archive materials in more experimental and creative ways, to inscribe new narratives into the historical record and highlight perspectives that have often been overlooked or marginalised. These archival films are meditations on preservation and memory, who gets to write history, and how the imaginative use of archive can uncover new meanings.
Under the Flags, the Sun is one such example. Composed entirely of archive material, it uses what precious little footage remained from Alfred Stroessner’s dictatorship in Paraguay to meticulously reconstruct the 35 years of his regime. Ahead of the film’s release at Bertha DocHouse this Friday, we look at other documentaries that use masterful editing and creative use of archive to produce new readings of history.
Under the Flags, the Sun / Juanjo Pereira / 2025 / 90 mins
An extraordinary archival excavation of Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year rule of Paraguay. With only 120 hours of footage remaining from the era, Juanjo Pereira compiled propaganda films, foreign newsreels, declassified documents and found fragments to uncover the hidden machinery of a dictatorship. A visual journey through the 20th Century media, Under the Flags, the Sun exposes how media cemented Stroessner’s power, controlled memory, and built a legacy that still lingers today.
Under the Flags, the Sun screens from Friday 25th July.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing / Theo Panagopoulos / 2024 / 17 mins
In his Sundance- and IDFA-winning short film, Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker and researcher Theo Panagopoulos reclaims archival footage of Palestinian wildflowers originally shot by a Scottish missionaries in the 1930s and 1940s. Through a thoughtful reimagining of this material, Panagopoulos shifts the focus away from the colonial gaze to centre the Arab Palestinians who appear, often silently and peripherally, in the background – figures largely ignored in the missionary’s original narrative. What emerges is a haunting and lyrical meditation on the violence of image-making and the politics of erasure. The film becomes a quiet act of resistance and a poignant testament to a land and people whose history is being erased as we speak.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing screens as part of our DocHouse Shorts: Memory Archive programme on Wednesday 3rd September.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat / Johan Grimonprez / 2024 / 150 mins
Juxtaposing archival footage of political figures, jazz performances and newsreels with newly uncovered footage, Johan Grimonprez’s megalith Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a masterclass in the art of editing. As intricately layered as the American jazz its beats are cut to, this Oscar-nominated documentary reconstructs the complex, sordid details of Congo’s liberation from Belgian colonial rule in June 1960, through to the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba only months later.
With its dextrous command of abundant sources – from rich archive materials and eyewitness accounts to testimony from mercenaries and CIA operatives – Grimonprez uses cinema as a political tool. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat disrupts time, sound and image to reframe historical narratives and expose how history itself is manipulated and controlled.
Showing from Sunday 17th August as part of our Once Upon a Summertime season of jazz docs.
I got kind of bewildered by this idea... about women writing their way into history, of kind of failing to enter the historical record, except through your experiential images – your point of view.
Courtney Stephens
Terra Femme / Courtney Stephens / 2021 / 62 mins
Originally conceived as a live documentary performance, her experimental essay film Terra Femme is a lyrical work composed entirely of amateur travelogues shot by women between 1920s and 1950s. One of the most compelling contemporary filmmakers working with archive, Courtney Stephens examines the gaps and silences of the archive to find alternate feminist histories.
Through these rarely seen images, Terra Femme weaves together questions of mobility, the gaze, and early female filmmaking as it explores themes of past worlds and cinematic excavation. The live nature of the documentary allows the archive to become a living and moveable thing. With close readings of the images and speculative narration, Stephens turns archival fragments into a meditation on visibility, authorship and the act of looking.
Read our interview with Courtney Stephens here.