On Sunday, 21 June, the Boarini Award was presented at the Festival to May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, on the occasion of the screening of My Brother’s Wedding by Charles Burnett (USA, 1983).

May Hong HaDuong is the daughter of immigrants and an active supporter of underrepresented communities. A graduate of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies, she has worked in the film archiving world for twenty years. She previously served as Senior Manager of Public Access at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she was the principal representative for access to the moving image archive. She is the fourth director in UCLA’s 60-year history, and the first woman to lead the prestigious institution.

Today, she directs the second-largest repository of audiovisual material in the United States, second only to the Library of Congress. The archive’s collections include over 500,000 titles, comprising approximately 159,000 films and 132,000 television programmes, over 9,000 kilometres of newsreels, 222,000 radio recordings and 9,000 sound transcription discs.
As she herself has said, “Moving images have such a profound impact on our culture and on how we view ourselves and others. I believe that as long as there are cultural producers, the need to archive will exist. And as long as there are human beings, the need to learn will exist… being at UCLA and having this opportunity allows me to combine collecting and research”. “The work undertaken by archives is fundamental to ensuring that people who wish to be seen are seen, and that audiences can learn about different cultures and worlds through moving images”. “As a twenty-first-century archive, we must find ways to offer multifaceted access that takes into account the diverse audiences we serve.”
Guided by these principles, since taking the helm of the Archive, May has intensified initiatives and research to bring to light the less explored and more marginalised areas of the collections. Alongside the extensive excavation and research work carried out – which has led to the digitisation and restoration of an impressive number of now finally accessible titles – she has strengthened the Archive’s public programming at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, a stronghold of cinema-going in Los Angeles, as well as its collaboration with American and international festivals.
Alongside this increasingly wide-ranging body of work, driven by a curiosity for both the new and the as yet unknown, May has intensified efforts to increase streaming access to the collections. Indeed, the free accessibility of the Hearst Newsreels is arguably the best news to come out of the archival world in recent years. Cinema is all about teamwork and under May’s leadership the exceptional expertise across the Archive’s various departments has been able to thrive.
The international cinematheque movement turns eighty-six this year; the work of May Hong HaDuong and her colleagues demonstrates that the path to the future is wide open, that the role of film archives in contemporary society will become increasingly important, and that they possess the power to make a significant, positive social impact in the service of free and widespread knowledge.


For all these exemplary reasons, we are proud to present the
VITTORIO BOARINI AWARD 2026
– established in 2022 in honour of the founder of the Cineteca di Bologna and presented annually during Il Cinema Ritrovato to international figures who have distinguished themselves in the preservation and dissemination of cinematographic heritage to
May Hong HaDuong, Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.