International Federation of Actors (FIA)

Overview

The International Federation of Actors (FIA) is the global federation representing national performers' unions and guilds across more than 100 countries. Founded in 1952, FIA advocates for performers' rights, equitable remuneration, and professional standards at the international level -- working with governments, international organizations (including the ILO, UNESCO, and WIPO), and global entertainment companies to ensure that performers' interests are represented in international policy discussions and treaty negotiations that shape the conditions under which they work worldwide.

FIA's member organizations include SAG-AFTRA (US), Equity (UK), MEAA (Australia), ACTRA (Canada), and national performers' unions from every region of the world. By connecting these national organizations into a global federation, FIA provides a coordinated international voice for the performing arts community that individual national unions cannot provide alone. FIA's advocacy is most consequential in international policy arenas where national unions have limited direct influence -- EU audiovisual policy, WIPO copyright negotiations, ILO labor standards development.

Performers' Rights Internationally

FIA's most significant ongoing advocacy concerns performers' rights in the digital and streaming environment. The transition from broadcast television and physical home entertainment to streaming platforms has created new challenges for performers' remuneration systems: residual structures developed for broadcast and home entertainment do not translate directly to streaming economics, and streaming platforms' global scale creates jurisdictional challenges for national unions whose collective bargaining authority is territorially limited.

FIA's work on streaming residuals, AI and synthetic performance, secondary use of performance recordings, and digital rights management informs the positions that national unions take in their own collective bargaining while also advancing common international standards through lobbying at the EU, UNESCO, and WIPO levels.

Artificial Intelligence and Performer Rights

AI-generated synthetic performance -- using artificial intelligence to generate convincing recreations of specific performers' appearances, voices, and characteristics without their participation or consent -- is among the most urgent contemporary challenges that FIA addresses. The ability to create synthetic performances using data derived from real performers' recorded work creates threats to performers' livelihoods, reputations, and fundamental rights of identity that existing copyright and contract frameworks were not designed to address.

FIA's advocacy for legal protections against unauthorized synthetic performance, for disclosure requirements for AI-generated content, and for equitable compensation when performers' likenesses and voices are used to train AI systems informs similar advocacy by national unions including SAG-AFTRA, which made AI protections a central demand in its 2023 strike.

What Filmmakers Should Know

For international productions working with performers from multiple countries, FIA's work on international performer rights standards provides context for understanding the diverse remuneration and rights frameworks that apply to performers from different national unions. Understanding that a US production engaging performers from European countries may be subject to European performers' rights frameworks -- not just US union agreements -- helps producers structure international cast agreements that comply with all applicable standards.

For performers working internationally, FIA's advocacy at the global level extends the protections that national union membership provides into the international policy arena where the conditions of global entertainment production are determined.

See Also

For the US performers' union that is FIA's largest member organization, see SAG-AFTRA in this directory. For comparable international federations of directors and producers, see FERA and FIAPF in this directory.