My paper highlights the methodological challenges related to an ongoing project to preserve and curate material related to M. Ali Issari’s ill-fated 1970s documentary collaboration between National Iranian Radio and Television and Michigan State University. It is intended to accompany what would be the North American premiere of our newly completed preservation work at the MESA film festival. Iranian documentarian (and MSU professor) Issari designed the series to investigate Iranian history, from ancient archaeological sites through its modern city life, in a style of voiceover and radio-play reenactment reminiscent of BBC documentary. The project was an ambitious educational initiative, but it was eventually shut down as a result of protests led by student activists. The archive of this project, including 28 reels of film, three completed films, and documentation of the NIRT training seminars on MSU campus, are all housed in the Michigan State University Archive. How does one determine what aspects are valuable in an archive of failure? How might we theorize these archives as more than footnotes in cinema history? When we have a number of projects created by displaced filmmakers that have faltered or remain half-finished, is there an archival praxis by which we might pay adequate attention to them as a phenomenon? The field of orphan and nontheatrical film studies has sought out moments of media volatility or plurality with the aim not to delimit failures and crosscurrents, but to explore the ways these failures lay bare the articulations and divisions within traditions ordinarily understood as seamless. I use insights from this field in order to develop ways to engage with these cinema institutions over individual films and to address archives that are dispersed or incomplete.