Life Stories relaunches free archive with 13,000 clips

More than 13,000 interview clips and 500 hours of conversation are now free to search in one place. Life Stories, the nonprofit organisation created by the Kunhardt family of documentary filmmakers, has relaunched its LifeStories.org platform as an open archive of films, interviews and personal stories. The relaunch was detailed by Deadline on 24 September 2026.

The site was co-founded by brothers George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt of Kunhardt Films. That production company is based in Pleasantville, New York, and was set up in its current form by Peter Kunhardt in 1987. Life Stories operates alongside it as a media and education platform that preserves and shares firsthand accounts from people who shaped public life and culture.

The scale is large. The collection holds more than 400 long interviews, cut into 11,000 short segments called stories and sorted with hundreds of subject tags. Viewers can jump straight to a moment rather than watch a full hour. Names in the archive include investor Warren Buffett, writers Toni Morrison and Nora Ephron, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and singer Gloria Estefan.

The rebuilt site offers three ways in: Search, Ask and Discover. Search finds a person or topic by keyword. Ask responds to questions using material from the archive. Discover groups stories by theme for viewers who want to browse. Support for the redesign came from Bloomberg Philanthropies through its Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture, which backs digital projects in the arts.

For teachers, there is a practical extra. LifeStories.org connects with Google Classroom, so educators can bring clips directly into lessons without downloads or extra accounts. The organisation said the tool is built for classroom use, with short segments that fit a lesson plan.

Two new films arrive with the relaunch: Behind Her Eyes and Becoming Katharine Graham. Life Stories produces and distributes documentary films about people whose lives inspire change, and it also releases its interview series THE THREAD through the site and its YouTube channel.

For viewers, this means no subscription and no rental fee. Type in a name, a job or an idea, and you get short first-person clips you can watch in minutes. It is an archive designed to be used, not just stored.