Jan de Vaal at the 1982 FIAF Congress in Oaxtepec. Photo courtesy of Eva Orbanz.
JAN DE VAAL FUND
c/o European Foundation Joris Ivens
Tweede Walstraat 19
6511 LN Nijmegen
NETHERLANDS
Individual Contact:
Ms Tineke de Vaal
andrestufkens.ivens.nl@gmail.com
The Jan de Vaal Fund was founded on 12 November 2018 by Tineke de Vaal to help fulfil the aim of facilitating the exchange and production of knowledge about the history of FIAF, and honour her late husband's memory.
Jan de Vaal (1922-2001) was for 40 years – between 1946 and 1987 – the director of the Netherlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, for 23 years a member of the Executive Committee of FIAF, and he was elected Honorary Member of FIAF in 1988. Next to establishing a national film archive from scratch in The Netherlands, for which in his view the international collaboration between FIAF members was quintessential, his main interest was the improvement of the global exchange of films, knowledge, and expertise in film history between national film archives affiliated to FIAF. For this purpose he started the FIAF Members’ Film Service, a circulating pool of prints for programming purposes, and the FIAF Bulletin together with Robert Daudelin and Eileen Bowser (later Journal of Film Preservation). One of the pioneers of the film archive movement, Jan de Vaal was a central figure in the FIAF community for over four decades, and understood the need and importance of a global network of film archives. The FIAF community was thus very close to his heart. In 1988 he was commissioned to create a so-called "Golden Book" of FIAF's history.
It is in this spirit that The Fund is currently supporting a new FIAF History Project, launched by FIAF in September 2019 in Lisbon and co-led by Christophe Dupin (FIAF) and André Stufkens (European Foundation Joris Ivens) with the assistance of a streering group of experts consisting of José Manuel Costa, Robert Daudelin, Eva Orbanz, Donata Pesenti Compagnoni, Tiago Baptista, and Laurent Le Forestier). One of the first expected outcomes of this longterm project is a book about the first 50 years of FIAF.
