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A worldbeating, innovative cultural project. |
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Docfera is a cultural and educational
project aims to become the first web platform and the largest digital archive
for Latin American documentaries in the world. The main ideologist behind
Docfera, Andrea Hirsch, took her inspiration from her family. Her father was
responsible for setting up various foundations, including Antorchas in
Argentina, Vitae in Brazil and Andes in Chile. With a record such as this to
live up to, Hirsch has brought together a specialised professional team whose
members have successfully brought Docfera to its launch. Its web platform is
fully developed and is now receiving and digitalising the documentary archive.
This groundbreaking, innovative system will mean that Latin America's enormous
documentary patrimony can now be preserved, promoted and digitally distributed.
The platform has two original formats to help search for different contents in
the archive: one is totally rational and precise, while the other is intuitive
and user-friendly. It is with this latter format that Docfera seeks to
revolutionise the way in which documentaries are distributed. The search is
geared to younger users, who are used to searching for key topics and ideas in
Internet, or who may just want to explore without a clear notion as to what
exactly they might turn up.
Universities and schools around the world will be the main audience for the
high-quality digitalised documentaries on offer by Docfera, which have been
subtitled in the most important languages.
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A new channel to promote and distribute
documentaries. |
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| In Docfera, documentary producers have a new
channel through which to promote their work. They can now sell their
documentaries securely thanks to the most modern system of copyright protection
(Digital Rights Management - DRM), which also sets the levels of reproduction
and copying permitted for each work, according to the purchase decisions of the
users. Similarly, authors can track the destinations of their works and the
income they can expect to receive in return through a back-end system which
administers the platform.
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A new form of film festival. |
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| Also included in the Docfera platform is the
On-Line Festival module, which permits the curatorship of virtual film
festivals and allows the members of the jury in different places around the
world to watch, discuss, comment on and vote for the various offerings in the
festival. The idea behind this development is to organise festivals with a
series of prestigious figures, who may often be unable to attend many festivals
due to problems of agendas, costs or other engagements.
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Interest in docfera around the world. |
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| A few months after its creation, the team formed
by Andrea Hirsch began to gather information and to publicise their project in
the main markets around the world. Since Docfera is such an ambitious project,
the plans had to be drawn up very carefully, but the response from institutions
and personalities from the worlds of culture and the documentary film was both
positive and immediate. The Goethe Institute, University of Southern
California, FUC Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires, Asociacion Cultural
Videobrasil and Malba Museo Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and many others,
all expressed great interest in the project. This was also true of
personalities of the stature of Michael Renov, Martin Fryer, Fernando Sulichin,
Manuel Antín, Eduardo Coutinho, Solange Farkas and Jorge La Ferla, some of whom
now belong to the staff of curators of Docfera.
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