Lifetime Achievement Award 2025
FOCAL International to Honour Declan Smith
LONDON, 2 April 2025: The FOCAL International Lifetime Achievement Award is gifted by the FOCAL International executive board to an individual who has contributed to and supported the audiovisual archive industry within their career and through their body of work.
We are delighted to announce that the 2025 recipient is Declan Smith.
Declan Smith will receive his award at the 22nd FOCAL International Awards Gala Ceremony on Thursday, 19 June 2025, at Church House Westminster, London.
----------
About Declan Smith
Declan Smith has spent four decades at the forefront of the archive industry. Starting at the BBC Film Library in the early 80s, he established himself as a ‘film researcher’ before the role was widely recognised as essential in TV production. In the late 80s and early 90s, he contributed to groundbreaking TV shows like Channel 4’s The Media Show and the BBC/A&E series Reputations, which set the standard for high-quality archive content. He later worked on landmark Norma Percy documentary series including Endgame in Ireland; Inside Obama’s White House and Putin, Russia and The West, which are highly regarded. More recently, he worked on Commonwealth on Film, which won a FOCAL Award in 2014.
Declan’s extensive body of work spans landmark historical productions, music and arts documentaries, and he tirelessly searched for the perfect footage, using his linguistic skills and charm to track down rare finds worldwide. He also mentored future archive producers, offering advice and support in their career paths. Declan’s legacy includes his significant credits, numerous awards, and his pioneering role in shaping the archive production field.
----------
Declan Smith shares his career trajectory with FOCAL
I began working with archives in 1981, in the BBC Film and Videotape Library in London. After a few years and with the prospect of being rostered from the Enquiries desk to Cataloguing, I applied for an Assistant Sales Exec job in Library Sales, and, to the surprise of many colleagues, who didn’t think I dressed the part, was taken on, by Jill Hawkins, founder of FOCAL International. After a couple of very satisfying years there, I moved to London Weekend Television. Between then and the beginning of the 1990s, I did archive research for fast-turnaround weekly programmes, most notably Weekend World and Wall to Wall TV’s Media Show.
Throughout the 90s, I worked at the BBC, initially on theme nights for BBC2, including TV Hell (a cheeky response to Channel 4’s TV Heaven), and subsequently on Granadaland, Cops on the Box, An Evening in with Alan Bennett, and Walking the Berlin Wall. And Danny Baker’s TV Heroes, on Pinky and Perky and Fanny Cradock – just to show that my CV isn’t all war and politics! For most of the later 1990s, I was one of a little team researching archive for the BBC / A&E biography series Reputations – very classy, well-funded documentaries on Alfred Hitchcock, Maria Callas, Dr Benjamin Spock, Muhammad Ali, Simon Wiesenthal, to name a few of the ones on which I worked.
The year 2000 saw me back on home ground, joining a team led by Norma Percy and Brian Lapping, for a series entitled Endgame in Ireland. In all I looked after archive for eight of their series, including Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace, for which we picked up two FOCAL Awards in 2006. Interspersed with these were history and arts documentaries, either BBC productions or commissions. In the mid-90s I had taken a break and gone back to school - that is, taking four months of intensive courses in German at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. I later put that time off to good use on projects including Auschwitz: The Nazis and The Final Solution, Matt Frei’s Berlin, and A House Through Time: London and Berlin. Alongside these I moved to Bristol for a couple of years, researching landmark series on country and rock music. From the twenty-teens, I’m especially pleased to have worked on a quarter of films by producer / director Teresa Griffith, on Leonora Carrington, Sylvia Plath, Egon Schiele and Lee Miller, and on a 2014 series called Commonwealth on Film produced and directed by Elaine Shepherd (still the most prolific winner of FOCAL awards – correct me if I’m wrong!). I’ve always been a keen traveller, and in the 1990s and 2000s I made many very satisfying archive research trips, to the US, Isreal and Palestine, Germany, Slovakia, Italy, Belfast …. and of course to the IWM’s All Saints Annexe in Austral Street. The present-day norm of working from home has many advantages, but for me working in an office alongside colleagues and going out and about in the archives was always preferable.
----------
Declan Smith said:
"In this, FOCAL's 40th anniversary year, I am delighted to receive this award, which I gratefully accept, as a tribute to the work that I and my fellow archive producers and researchers have done throughout those years. The film / television industry has changed dramatically in that period, and our archive community has evolved with it, establishing and maintaining professional practices and standards. It's never been easy, and at this point in time our situation is exceptionally difficult, but I believe that this legacy can support and carry us though the present turbulence."
FOCAL International stated:
"We are thrilled to celebrate Declan Smith as this year's esteemed FOCAL Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. Through his remarkable body of work and unwavering commitment, Declan has not only been a pioneer but also a passionate advocate for the archive industry. His contributions have left an indelible mark, shaping the future of the field and inspiring countless professionals. This honour is a testament to his exceptional dedication and lasting impact."
----------
Previous Lifetime Achievement Award winners include Eric Kulberg, Sue Malden, Bríd Dooley, film director Julian Temple, pioneer filmmaker Gerry Weinburn, and Emmy-nominated director-producer Serge Viallet.
For further information, please get in touch with us at [email protected]