WAFA stands for West Asian Film Archive, which is either a very tidy acronym or a happy accident depending on who you ask. Either way, we are keeping it. It has a good sound to it something between a name and an exhale, which feels appropriate for a project that spends a lot of its time breathing life into things that were at risk of going quiet.
We are an audiovisual archive dedicated to the film cultures of West Asia and its diasporas.. What it means in practice is that we spend a significant amount of time watching, listening, reading, following half-leads across the internet at unreasonable hours, and occasionally getting completely derailed by a forty-second clip uploaded in 2009 with no description, no context, no clear provenance, and absolutely no right to be as compelling as it is. This is, more or less, how archival research works. You pull on one thread and find yourself standing somewhere entirely unexpected, surrounded by materials you did not know existed, with a new set of questions and only a vague memory of what you originally came to find.
WAFA is built around the conviction that this is not a problem. It is the point.
The archive is not trying to be a library, or a database, or a search engine for West Asian cinema. There are other projects that do those things, and they do them well. What WAFA is trying to do is something different: to build a space where film history can be experienced as the layered, fragmentary, contradictory, and occasionally astonishing thing that it actually is, rather than the tidy, complete, and fully indexed version we might prefer it to be.
WAFA is built across three interconnected layers, and understanding how they relate to each other is probably the best way to understand what the archive is trying to do.
The first is the audiovisual collection itself: film clips, stills, trailers, production materials, critical writing, contextual documents, and the various objects that orbit cinema without quite being cinema : the poster, the programme note, the review written in a language that half the people who saw the film could not read. These materials are gathered from across the region and its diasporas, spanning different periods, genres, national contexts, and modes of production.
They are not arranged into a single authoritative timeline, because such a timeline would be, to put it plainly, a fiction. Instead, they are held in relation to each other, connected by theme, atmosphere, formal resonance, and sometimes by nothing more than the feeling that two things belong in proximity.
The second layer is the sound archive, which deserves more than a passing mention because sound is not, within WAFA, a supporting feature. It is a primary mode of engagement with film history, held in the same regard as the visual materials it sits alongside.
The third layer is what makes WAFA most distinctively itself: a series of interactive, text-based experiences through which users navigate the archive. These are built using Twine, and they transform the act of browsing into something closer to wandering, reading, and making decisions. More on this shortly, because it warrants proper explanation rather than a line and a half.
There is a tendency, when building a film archive, to treat sound as secondary. Cinema is understood as a visual medium, the thinking goes, and so the audiovisual collection comes first, and sound appears as annotation, as context, as the thing that accompanies the images rather than standing independently of them.
WAFA does not share this assumption.
The sound archive within WAFA holds oral histories, ambient recordings, film audio that has become detached from its visual source, experimental compositions, voices documenting experiences that were never filmed, and fragments of sonic material that exist in genuinely ambiguous relation to any image. These are not supplementary materials. They are archives of a different register of experience one that images cannot always access, and one that carries its own forms of historical knowledge.
Sound does something particular to memory. It arrives differently from visual information less amenable to the analytical distance that images sometimes allow, more immediately physical, more capable of producing the sensation of being somewhere else, or somewhen else, without quite knowing how you got there.
A street recording from a city that has since changed beyond recognition carries information that no photograph can fully replicate. A voice describing a film that no longer exists in any accessible form is, in its way, as valuable as a copy of the film itself. A musical cue detached from its scene can evoke the emotional logic of a work more precisely than any written description.
Within the interactive layer of WAFA, sound and image and text are woven together so that listening becomes a method of navigation, not just reception. You might follow a piece of audio into a new part of the archive.
You might find that a sound you encountered early in your visit reappears later, in a different context, carrying different weight. The archive uses sound as both material and structure as something to encounter and as something that shapes what you encounter next.
Some of the most interesting things in the sound collection are the fragments that have become partially unmoored from their origins. A recording that was never publicly released. A piece of audio that documents something a camera was not present to capture. An interview conducted decades after the fact, in which a filmmaker remembers something that differs in small but significant ways from the official record.
These moments of divergence are not problems to be corrected. They are the archive's most honest materials, because they tell the truth about memory, which is that it is not a storage system. It changes as it goes.
Twine
Most archival interfaces operate on a simple premise: you know, or roughly approximate, what you are looking for, and the system retrieves it. This is useful. It is efficient. It is, for many purposes, exactly what is needed.
It is also, in a quiet way, a very particular set of assumptions about how people relate to historical knowledge that engagement with archives is goal-oriented, that materials exist in stable categories, that the purpose of searching is to find a specific thing and then stop. WAFA is interested in what happens when you build an interface that makes different assumptions.
The interactive layer of WAFA is built using Twine, a tool most commonly associated with interactive fiction, used by writers and game designers to create branching, non-linear narratives. Within WAFA, Twine has been adopted not as a way of turning the archive into a game, but as a way of thinking about archival structure about how materials can be held in relation to each other, about what kinds of navigation feel like discovery rather than retrieval, and about how an interface can reflect the complexity of the histories it holds rather than smoothing that complexity into something more legible but less true.
The technical architecture uses frameworks called SugarCube and Harlowe, which allow for the creation of passage-based structures networks of nodes, each holding something partial, connected to others through links that are not always predictable. A user might enter through a film clip and be offered a choice between following the history of its production, exploring the critical reception it received, or listening to a sound recording that connects to the same geography. Each choice leads somewhere different. The archive does not announce which route is the correct one, because there is no correct one.
What makes this particularly interesting, beyond the surface experience of non-linearity, is the way variables and memory systems within Twine allow the archive to track, in a gentle and non-invasive way, the paths a user has taken. Themes accumulate. A user who consistently follows questions of displacement will begin to see that thread resurface across different materials and contexts.
A user interested in sound design will find the archive quietly offering more of what they have shown themselves to care about. This is not algorithmic manipulation of the kind that fills social media feeds with increasingly extreme versions of whatever you last looked at. It is closer to the experience of spending a long time in a physical archive, where your own sustained attention begins to shape what you notice where the act of looking carefully at one thing makes you better at seeing related things elsewhere.
Repetition is also deliberately built into the structure. Encountering the same fragment in two different contexts is not a failure of navigation. It is an invitation to notice that the same material can mean different things depending on where you have come from and what you are carrying when you arrive at it. This is something cinema itself has always known that a scene watched for the second time is not the same scene, because you are not the same viewer and WAFA borrows the logic freely.
The phrase sometimes used for what WAFA is doing is "counter-archive," which sounds considerably more combative than it is in practice. Nobody is storming any institutions. There are no manifestos being nailed to any doors. What the term actually points toward is something more patient and more structural: a shift in where attention falls, and a set of questions about which histories have been afforded care, by whom, and under what conditions.
Film archives, like all archives, are not neutral. The decisions that shape them what to collect, what to preserve, what to catalogue, how to describe, what to make accessible and to whom are decisions made by people, within institutions, shaped by particular cultural, political, and economic contexts. Over time, these decisions accumulate into something that looks like a record, but is in fact a record of what was valued, by whom, and at what moment. Archival absence is not the same as historical absence. Something can have happened, been documented, been experienced by many people, and still not exist in any accessible archive. This is a fact about power as much as it is a fact about paper or film stock.
WAFA takes this seriously without making it the only thing it talks about. The goal is not to produce a counter-narrative that simply inverts the existing hierarchies and declares itself complete. The goal is to build a space that is genuinely attentive to what has been overlooked that follows the unofficial record alongside the official one, that treats informal and community-based preservation as legitimate archival work, and that is honest about its own limitations and positionality.
In practice, this means that WAFA draws on an unusually wide range of source materials. Institutional archives sit alongside personal collections. Festival catalogues sit alongside incomplete uploads on video platforms. Academic writing sits alongside the kind of informal, distributed knowledge that fan communities produce and maintain with extraordinary dedication. These sources are not treated as equivalent they carry different levels of verification, different contexts of production, different claims to authority but none of them is simply more valid than the others. The question is always what a particular source reveals and what it obscures, rather than whether it belongs in the archive at all.
Fan practices deserve particular mention here. The communities that form around West Asian cinema online and in person, in diaspora contexts and in the region itself perform archival functions constantly, whether or not they would describe themselves in those terms. A subtitling collective that makes a film accessible across linguistic borders is doing preservation work. A fan who maintains a detailed personal record of a director's output, tracking down materials from across decades and multiple countries, is doing curatorial work. A discussion thread in which dozens of people collectively reconstruct the plot of a film that most of them saw once, years ago, on a television broadcast that will never be repeated, is doing something that no institution could replicate.
WAFA includes these materials, credits these contributions, and takes them seriously as sources of knowledge about cinema and its cultures.
Building WAFA requires a research process that is simultaneously rigorous and openly exploratory, which is a combination that occasionally produces mild existential tension and frequently produces very good finds.
The formal dimension of the research draws on established archival sources, academic literature in film studies and archival theory, institutional collections, and the kinds of primary documents that tell the story of how films were made and what happened to them after they left the hands of their makers. This work is slow, methodical, and often takes place in multiple languages, which brings its own challenges and its own pleasures.
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Armenian, and numerous other languages run through the archive's materials, and translation is not treated within WAFA as a final step applied to a finished structure. It is understood as an ongoing interpretive condition something that shapes every stage of research, because the meanings carried by a term in one language do not simply transfer into another without being altered in transit. When a translation is uncertain, WAFA makes the uncertainty visible. When a concept resists direct equivalence, the resistance stays in the record rather than being papered over with a confident but misleading approximation.
The informal dimension of the research is harder to systematise, which is both its limitation and its value. It involves following links that lead nowhere obvious, spending time on platforms and in communities that operate outside academic frameworks, and being willing to recognise expertise in unexpected places. A collector who has spent twenty years acquiring materials related to a particular national cinema often knows things that no published source contains. A fan community that has produced hundreds of thousands of words of analysis and documentation around a body of work has generated a form of scholarship that looks different from a peer-reviewed article but is not less serious in its attention.
The research process is also genuinely iterative in a way that is sometimes difficult to explain to people who have not experienced it. You do not always know what you are looking for until you find something adjacent to it, and the process of understanding what you have found often sends you back to reframe what you thought you already knew. The archive is not built in a straight line. It is built through accumulation, revision, unexpected connection, and the particular form of alertness that comes from having spent long enough with a set of materials that you begin to notice what is missing from them.
Ethics runs through this process as a practical concern, not merely a theoretical one. Not everything that could be included should be. Some materials carry sensitivities: political, cultural, personal that require careful thought about what sharing them publicly might mean for the people or communities connected to them. Some materials are held by communities with legitimate stakes in how they are represented and circulated. WAFA does not resolve these questions in advance or pretend to have a universal framework that covers every case. What it does is remain attentive to them, take advice from people with relevant knowledge and experience, and make decisions that prioritise care over completeness.
WAFA is not a self-contained project, and it does not aspire to be.
One of the things that conventional archival logic tends toward, not always intentionally is comprehensiveness as a goal in itself. The ideal archive, in this model, is one that contains everything relevant to its subject, is fully catalogued, and requires no other archive to supplement it. This is an understandable aspiration, but it has some consequences worth examining: it can produce a competitive rather than collaborative relationship between archives, it can lead to a form of accumulation that prioritises quantity over context, and it can obscure the fact that no archive is truly self-contained, because everything it holds was connected to other things that it does not hold.
WAFA starts from a different premise. It is explicitly positioned as one node in a network connected outward to other archives, other collections, other communities, and other bodies of knowledge about West Asian cinema. Where materials exist elsewhere in accessible forms, WAFA points toward them rather than duplicating them. Where WAFA holds something that supplements or complicates what other archives hold, it makes those connections visible. The goal is a web of relation rather than a single comprehensive repository.
This also means that WAFA is built through ongoing dialogue with other practitioners researchers who bring deep knowledge of specific regional contexts, community members whose personal and collective histories illuminate the archive's materials in ways that no document can fully capture, curators and archivists at institutions whose holdings connect to WAFA's own. These relationships are reciprocal wherever possible, and oriented toward genuine exchange. The archive does not extract knowledge from communities to enrich itself; it tries to contribute back, to make itself useful to the people whose histories it engages with.
Future development will deepen these connections in concrete ways — through collaboration with specific archives on shared cataloguing projects, through events that bring researchers and community members into direct conversation with the archive's materials, and through an expanding network of links that allows WAFA to function as a point of orientation within the broader landscape of West Asian cinema archives.
WAFA is unfinished. It will remain unfinished for the foreseeable future, which is not a limitation but a design principle.
Archives that present themselves as complete are archives that have stopped listening to new materials, to new perspectives on materials they already hold, to the communities whose histories they claim to represent, and to the ongoing production of knowledge that continues to change what we understand about the past. WAFA is deliberately built as a structure that can grow, change, and be revised, because the histories it engages with are not stable objects waiting to be recorded but ongoing processes that look different depending on when and from where you are looking at them.
On a practical level, this means several things. The interactive layer will become more complex over time, developing deeper branching structures, more nuanced uses of the memory and variable systems that Twine allows, and a more seamless integration between the text-based navigation and the audiovisual materials it gives access to. The sound archive will expand, with particular attention to forms of sonic documentation that have not traditionally been considered archival materials. Participatory features spaces where users can contribute their own annotations, materials, and memories to the archive — are in development, with careful thought about what participation means, how it is moderated, and how contributed materials are credited and contextualised.
Multilingual design is another priority that shapes how the project is developing, and it is worth being specific about what this means. Many digital archives approach languages other than English as alternative versions of a primary structure translations that make the same content available in different languages. WAFA is interested in something different: an architecture in which multiple languages are present simultaneously, in which moving between them is part of the experience of the archive rather than a way of avoiding it, and in which the differences between languages the things that translate imperfectly, the concepts that exist in one context and not another, the registers of formality or intimacy that have no direct equivalents are treated as information rather than noise.
There are also ambitions that extend beyond the screen. The non-linear, exploratory logic that Twine enables in a digital environment has a spatial dimension that WAFA is interested in exploring in physical exhibition contexts. What would it mean to move through an archive with your body rather than a cursor? How might the decision-making that shapes a Twine-based experience be translated into movement through a room, or a series of rooms, where the connections between materials are built into the space itself? These are not hypothetical questions. They are live areas of development, shaped by the understanding that archives are not exclusively digital objects and that some of the most important encounters with historical materials happen in shared physical spaces where the presence of other people is part of the experience.
Whether those spaces will have comfortable seating is, frankly, the most important question, and one that has not yet been fully resolved.
WAFA is, finally, an invitation.
Not the kind that requires an RSVP, or a particular level of prior knowledge, or any sense of what you are supposed to get out of it. The kind that simply opens a door and suggests that what is on the other side might be worth exploring.
Cinema across West Asia is one of the richest, most varied, and most underrepresented bodies of film culture in the world. It spans enormously different national contexts, film traditions, and historical conditions. It includes works of extraordinary beauty, political courage, formal experimentation, and popular pleasure. It includes films that were celebrated internationally and films that were suppressed, films that circulated widely and films that barely survived, films that were made with significant institutional support and films that were made despite the active opposition of every institution involved. It includes comedies and tragedies and documentaries and animations and genre films and experimental works and everything that refuses easy categorisation.
WAFA does not claim to represent all of this. Nobody could. What it does is pay attention to it, gather what it can, connect what it finds to other things being found elsewhere, and build spaces where all of this can be encountered with some of the care and curiosity it deserves.
Come in. Follow something. Let it lead you somewhere you did not expect.
The archive will be here when you want to come back.
