Finding More than I Asked For <em>Discussing the Impact of COVID-19 on the Film Heritage Foundation, Mumbai, and Korean Film Archive, Seoul</em>

Abstract

Finding More than I Asked ForDiscussing the Impact of COVID-19 on the Film Heritage Foundation, Mumbai, and Korean Film Archive, Seoul Victoria Duckett (bio) It is ironic that on the day I have put aside to write a reflection on film archives in Asia for this second iteration of "Conversations"—one with Shivendra Singh, founder and director of the Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai, and another with Sungji Oh, head of the Korean Film Archive's Cinematheque team—I had my first COVID-19 test. I woke to find my teenage son sprawled across a beanbag on the living room floor, confiding in a rasping voice that he had a sore throat and was unable to sleep. With COVID-19 cases slowly on the rise in Victoria, and with our first hard shutdown of the border with New South Wales imposed three days ago, on January 1, 2020, I felt duty-bound to bundle my son into a car, drive him through a testing site, and impose quarantine on the household until our results were in. Yes, the cotton swab made me gag and brought tears to my eyes. But there were some positives. As the doctor attending our car cheerfully told us, we had been lucky to be tested today; yesterday, the queues were five hours long. I was possibly being overly cautious in taking us to be tested. After all, no one I know in Australia has had COVID-19, traveled to the hot spots listed in our daily news cycles, or been abroad, and only one family member has presented with a sore throat. But I also actively provide support to aging parents. Moreover, my partner's mother is a healthy ninety-five-yearold who similarly depends on us for groceries, technological support (i.e., Sunday Mass on Zoom), and company. I am therefore acutely concerned about community transmission. Moreover, the father of my boys recently flew into Australia from abroad and is currently in quarantine. He managed to obtain a visa only because one child is a minor. Significantly—particularly in view of what Shivendra Singh speaks to me about in terms of poverty and class in India—he was also able to pay for hotel quarantine and a very expensive business class airplane ticket to Melbourne (which was the only ticket available for purchase). If he records two COVID-19 negative results, he can see his children for the first time in more than a year. Both have grown. The oldest one has just completed his final year of school, doing this largely online after schools shut down in Victoria in March. These particular circumstances—to which I would add an extraordinarily busy academic year of online teaching while negotiating homeschooling and 111 days of lockdown—pale into insignificance when I look at what colleagues, family, and friends are facing abroad. Or better, my understanding of the enormity of what is occurring because of COVID-19 is crystallized when I reflect on the conversation I had with Shivendra for this article in October. My previous "Conversations" were undertaken in May 2020. At this early point in the coronavirus pandemic, I joined Meg Labrum (of the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra) to reflect on archival practice following a summer of bushfires and Matteo Pavesi (as director of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan) to detail the initiatives his archive was taking in reaching new, intergenerational audiences through curating online initiatives from home. At that point in time, I did not ask about mortality rates, migrant populations, or the "actual" lived experience of lockdown. What I sought, instead, was information about archival capacity: I asked Labrum and Pavesi about organizing teams to work from home, the focus given to curatorial projects, and the public outreach they were enjoying—the same, and yet different. In [End Page 231] hindsight, it is as though COVID-19 was being imagined as a pandemic impacting an archive's work practices and online visibility (it moves largely online, or at least newly develops materials in this space). INTRODUCING INDIA Shivendra began our discussion by reminding me of the desperate reality India is facing. Given just four hours' notice on...