Manifesto of the Workers of the Cinemateca Brasileira

The Cinemateca Brasileira has been closed since August 2020, when government representatives of the Ministry of Tourism took back the keys from the Social Organization that once was in charge of managing it. Since then, there has been no technical staff hired and the collection remains unattended, with no information being released about its conditions. For this reason, we issue a warning about the risks to the institution's collection, equipment, databases, and facilities.

The possibility of cellulose nitrate films self-combusting and the consequent risk of fire often receives a lot of attention from the media and the public. The Cinemateca has faced four fires in its seventy-four years, the last one occurring in 2016, with the destruction of some 500 works. The risk of a new fire is real. Continuous technical monitoring is the main means of prevention. The state of the cellulose acetate collection is also critical. The collection is estimated to contain around 240,000 reels, and it corresponds to the largest part of the Cinemateca Brasileira's audiovisual collection. This collection requires stable temperature and humidity, and in the absence of such conditions, it suffers a drastic acceleration of its deterioration process. Regular technical monitoring and other preservation actions, including laboratory processing, are also vital.

In recent months, there has been heavy rain in the region of São Paulo where the Cinemateca is located, and these rains can cause power outages. There is no way of knowing if there is a working generator at the institution or if the air conditioning systems are operating. When the technical team was still working, frequent changes in these systems often occurred, and it was necessary to make adjustments to the equipment in order to safeguard the collections. The rains also constitute a strong threat to a portion of the collections, especially the paper, photographic, analog, and digital video collections. Previously known seepages may have spread if the gutters have not been cleaned and properly monitored.

In recent years, threats to the collection such as the advent of a sudden spread of fungi, the presence of rodents, infiltrations, leaks, problems in the climatic equipment, and the auto-combustion of a roll of nitrate destined for disposal were swiftly remedied by the fast action of the staff. The February 2020 flood is a tragic example of these dangers, and it shows how imperative it is to have a team ready to act.

In this scenario, there is also the issue of the Image and Sound Laboratory, one of the most complete audiovisual laboratories in the world, with specialized machinery for photochemical processing and digitization of films and several analog video formats. Ten years ago, this laboratory was considered to be the third most efficient film laboratory worldwide by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)—behind two leading institutions in the United States. The maintenance of the machinery is complex, as it brings together historic equipment and state-of-the-art technology, demanding a highly specialized team, whose absence leads to the compromise and loss of equipment that is often irreplaceable. A consequence of the current paralysis has been the loss of decades of meticulous work and a waste of the immense public resources that have been invested in this equipment.

Besides the conservation of its physical collection, the Cinemateca Brasileira promotes the research and diffusion of audiovisual content throughout Brazil. Through online streaming via the Cultural Content Bank (BCC), part of the Cinemateca's collection was made freely available to society. By processing the works from the Legal Deposit and prospecting and cataloging the audiovisual productions in the Brazilian Filmography (FB) database, it was possible to maintain the historical inventory of an important part of Brazil's contemporary audiovisual heritage. The BCC has been offline since October 2020 due to the lack of basic care with the Cinemateca's datacenter and other data repositories allocated in the institutional facilities. In addition to this, unprocessed information from the Legal Deposit continues to accumulate, putting at risk the Cinemateca's census procedure—a process that is quite rare in other countries.

In its current situation...