The SEAPAVAA Conference is a Southeast Asian Audio-Visual Archives Conference that serves as a venue for gathering, networking, and sharing best practices in audio-visual archiving across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Organized by SEAPAVAA (Southeast Asia and Pacific Audio-Visual Archive Association), the conference is held annually on a rotating basis in various member countries. This year, the SEAPAVAA Conference will be held in Ipoh, Malaysia, and IFAS will be one of the presenters showcasing work related to the restoration of “Asrama Dara” in 2024–2025, a collaborative effort with the Ministry of Culture, the Puloraya Film Digitization Team, the Usmar Ismail Cinema Society, Sinematek Indonesia, and Render Digital.
The paper to be presented is titled: “Asrama Dara” Restoration in the Midst of Indonesia’s Decentralized Film Ecosystem. It discusses how the decentralized film archiving scheme in Indonesia which IFAS believes is the most current solution for film archiving practices in the country can also be applied to film restoration projects, as well as how the inspection and restoration processes unfolded and the findings discovered during the process. This paper was authored by Andika Wahyu (Director of the Indonesian Film Archivist Society) and Tri Yuni Aulia (Coordinator for Film Archive Preservation at IFAS), based on research notes compiled by Andika Wahyu, film inspections conducted by Aditya Martodiharjo and the Puloraya Film Digitization Team, and Kharismanto with Render Digital – Film Resotration Team.
Usmar Ismail is a restoration project initiated by the Indonesian Film Archivist Society in 2024 and set to continue through 2025; throughout the process, numerous discoveries have underscored the urgency of preserving this film to complete the history of Indonesian cinema. These range from the historical context—explaining why this film is one of the most significant works by Usmar Ismail—to the socio-political climate of the time, and the current physical condition of the film.
The Symposium will take place on June 8–9, 2026, in Malaysia. IFAS will present this paper online, and the recording and presentation materials will be published on the website archive-ifas.org following the conference.
For those wishing to attend the conference in person, registration is now available at:
seapavaaconference.com