Founded in Paris in 1938, the Internation Federation of Film Archive (FIAF) is dedicated to the preservation of motion pictures as cultural heritage and historic documents. Today, the collaborative association includes over 120 archives in more than 65 countries. FIAF’s database, the International Index to Film Periodicals, offers in-depth coverage of the world’s foremost academic and popular film journals from 1972 to present day. It contains over 500,000 article citations from over 345 periodicals.  

Each record in the database contains a full bibliographic description, abstract, and comprehensive headings including biographical names, film titles, and general subjects. It also has a thesaurus with over 20,000 subject terms.  

In addition to the film index, FIAF also offers Treasures from the Film Archives, a collection of credits and holdings information for nearly 50,000 films from the silent era, prior to 1929.

Like IBZ, FIAF uses a transliteration system similar those often used continental Europe (i.e., "сценарист" becomes "scenarist," "Островский" becomes "Ostrovskij," "я" becomes "ja"). However, there are some exceptions (i.e., "Жан д'Арк" is represented as "ZHan d'Ark," not "Zan d'Ark."). 

FIAF also contains vernacular language sources, including Polish, Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovenian. Citations to articles in Slavic & East European languages alone comprise over 8% of the database.