WAFA (West Asian Film Archive) is an evolving audiovisual archive dedicated to preserving, reimagining, and connecting film cultures across West Asia and its diasporas. We bring together moving images, sound, and interactive storytelling to create a living, participatory space where histories of cinema are not only stored, but experienced.
Our archive moves beyond static preservation. Alongside film materials and contextual records, WAFA hosts text-based, choose-your-own-adventure narratives that invite users to navigate archival fragments in non-linear ways. These interactive works foreground the act of searching, remembering, and interpreting as creative processes, encouraging audiences to engage with the archive as co-explorers rather than passive viewers.
Sound is central to our practice. Our sound archive gathers oral histories, ambient recordings, film audio, and experimental sonic works, offering alternative pathways into cinematic memory. By listening closely, we aim to surface overlooked textures of film culture, voices, environments, and affective traces that often escape traditional archival frameworks.
WAFA is also a network. We maintain active connections with film archives, community initiatives, and independent collectors across West Asia and beyond. Through these relationships, we support knowledge exchange, collaborative curation, and the circulation of materials that might otherwise remain inaccessible or fragmented.
Grounded in principles of accessibility, care, and collaboration, WAFA positions the archive as a space of encounter: between past and present, between institutions and communities, and between different ways of knowing film. We are not only preserving histories we are building new ones, together.
