Activating The Danish Film Institute's archive

Context

We live in a world where large American streaming services play a major role in how we experience film and television. In Denmark, online streaming is the primary way that users, consume audiovisual content. Given that most Danes now use streaming platforms as their primary way of watching film and television, and that most of these platforms are international, maybe we need to reflect on how these shapes our understanding of culture and cultural heritage. What might be lost in our interaction with these systems? As society becomes more dependent on international streaming platforms, should we question whether there are still spaces for people to engage with audiovisual culture rooted in their own cultural heritage?

DFI is the central institution responsible for preserving Danish film heritage, and much of its archive is now digitalized and accessible online. But in its current form, the archive is open, yet passive: the volume of material and reliance on specific search filters mean users need prior knowledge to navigate it, making it function more like a research tool than a space for meaningful interaction.

This project relates to UN Sustainable Development Goal 11.4: to protect cultural heritage. In this context, protection is understood as not only preservation but as activation. While the Danish Film Institute safeguards a significant part of Denmark’s cultural history, preservation alone does not ensure engagement. Archival film risks becoming something that is stored rather than experienced. The project therefore investigates how the archive can be activated beyond its current presentation and made more accessible and engaging for a broader audience.

Process

The process began by mapping the media landscape, from algorithm-driven platforms like Netflix and HBO to more niche, curation-focused alternatives such as MUBI, The Criterion Channel, and Danish film festivals. This revealed a contrast between platforms built around algorithmic volume and platforms built around context and community. Based on this, three early scenarios explored different curatorial approaches to the archive, using news, everyday life, and universal emotions as starting points. These scenarios functioned mainly as visual exercises, which led to three more conceptual directions grounded in theory. A matrix was then used to position these directions against the existing landscape of streaming services and festivals, mapping visual language (conservative to alternative) against cultural position (closed to open). This clarified that the most accessible approach would lean toward an open cultural position, with a visual identity balanced between clarity and a more contemporary expression. It also raised questions about the individual, screen-based nature of streaming, which shifted the project toward the physical festival format.

Strategy

Navlen's strategy is built around two spheres, a social one and an informative one, connected through what this project defines as the informed conversation, the meeting point between them. The social sphere is created through the physical festival format: films screened simultaneously in small pavilions across Denmark, designed as spaces for collective viewing and gathering rather than traditional cinema. The informative sphere is carried by a digital space and booklets present in the pavilions, where contextual material in the form of articles, prose and other texts, relates the films to contemporary culture and questions their influence on the way we live today. The informed conversation sits between the two, turning the shared viewing experience into something that can be discussed and reflected on together.

Each festival edition is organised around a universal emotion, such as love, stress, or euphoria. By using emotion as a curatorial framework, Navlen creates a more accessible entry point into archival material. Unlike political or academic framings, which can feel exclusive, emotions offer a common ground that most people can relate to through their own lived experience.

The festival format is designed to encourage collective spectatorship. Rather than relying on digital distribution alone, films are screened simultaneously in small pavilions across Denmark, turning viewing into a shared social event. In this way, Navlen moves audiences out of individual digital spaces and into physical environments where reflection and discussion can happen together.

How the platform communicates

The name Navlen takes inspiration from the Danish term navlepilleri, which means to be centred around oneself. hile the term often carries negative connotations, it isn't necessarily a bad thing: To focus intensely on something, and centre attention around it, is in many ways what the festival attempts to do, placing focus on Danish film heritage. At the same time, the navel and the umbilical cord symbolize origin and connection, traces of where life begins and develops, much like films can be seen as part of our shared cultural DNA. The name is direct but doesn't fully make sense at first, its meaning emerges through curiosity and interpretation, much like the platform itself.

In how it communicates, Navlen embodies curiosity, straightforwardness, and a slight difference from what you're normally exposed to. It's your quirky friend who asks random questions to understand new things, like a child curious about the world. Why do we wear clothes? Why do we speak Danish in Denmark? It's a kind of navel-gazing around origins and Danish culture, but in a positive sense, gathering all the right questions, and all the wrong ones, into one.

This theme of curiosity, also plays a role in how Navlen looks. The "A" in navel becomes the physical navel of the identity, a logo that almost acts like mascot, popping up to ask its quiet, strange questions, and changing shape depending on the theme's emotion. It works as a spatial anchor as much as a logo, expanding and framing material across posters, publications, and pavilions. The colours are bright but not neon, with a nostalgic feel borrowed from analogue film. Holton, DFI's typeface, is used for big headlines and the navel itself, tying Navlen to The Danish Film Institute, while Neue Haas Grotesk handles everything else, keeping information clear and easy to read.

What does it mean to have an accessible archive and activate it?

Through the project I have investigated how a passive archive can be activated to reach a broader audience than it currently does. The project argues that accessibility is not only about providing access to material, but about how that material is framed, contextualised, and shared.

The outcome, Navlen, presents a strategy in which archival film is activated through curated themes built around universal emotions, contextual material that connects the archive to contemporary culture, and a physical festival format that brings audiences together through collective viewing and informed conversation. Through this combination of curation, context, and collective experience, the project explores how archival film can move from something stored to something experienced, becoming part of a shared cultural conversation rather than a research tool reserved for those who already know how to look for it.