Discover the highlights in tomorrow’s programme!

Cinema Modernissimo – 7pm
Jonathan Glazer at the festival
Our meetings with filmmakers are unmissable appointments in the diaries of all cinema lovers, and this year’s programme continues with a Cinema Lesson featuring Jonathan Glazer, one of the great contemporary directors. The British director won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2024 for The Zone of Interest – based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis – which recounted the tragedy of the Holocaust from a new perspective, establishing it as an instant classic. Glazer will meet the public of the festival again on Sunday 29 June, when he introduces the screening of The Zone of Interest in Piazza Maggiore.

Cinema Modernissimo  – 11.15am | Auditorium – DAMSLab – 2.30pm, 4.50pm and 6.15pm | Cinema Europa – 5.30pm
Documents and Documentaries
Friday offers a veritable treasure trove of documentaries. There are two extraordinary portraits of filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick – The Invisible Man – considered by director Paul Joyce to be “the definitive portrait of a true cinematic genius” – and Merchant Ivory (presented by director Stephen Soucy and, via video link, James Ivory), the unique story of two artists whose films narrated British and Indian culture. Another unmissable appointment is the story of the legendary The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Directed by Linus O’Brien, son of the charismatic author of the original musical and the screenwriter of the film, the documentary will be introduced by Peter Suschitzky, the cinematographer of Rocky Horror and many David Cronenberg films. Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il Vangelo secondo Matteo also belongs to the “films about films” subgenre (in this case, “to be made”), where Pasolini’s camera becomes a notebook with which to jot down his impressions on the places where Christ preached. Pasolini is also the subject of another of the day’s documentaries, Gli amici di Pier Paolo, introduced by director Francesco Giuncolucci. Another fertile subgenre is that of the rockumentary, to which Festival belongs. It tells the story of the Newport Folk Festival, immortalising the famous moment when Bob Dylan switched from acoustic guitar to electric guitar.

Recovered and Restored
The day’s rich menu of restorations is decidedly dark in tone. Starting with two crime movies: Fabio Calzavara’s Contro la legge, featuring Marcello Mastroianni in his first leading role as a small-time money launderer, and Vernon Sewell’s Strongroom, a race-against-time thriller that is a standout entry in the British ‘B’ film tradition. In the evening, Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, a dark fable about the power of money, a cruel and sarcastic counterpoint to the American dream, and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, “a portrait of a hellish metropolis, where violence and lust are endemic, and where the only apparent response is apocalyptic violence” (Alberto Pezzotta). Not to be missed, Rapt, one of the first sound films made in Switzerland, at the centre of a meeting on restoration on Saturday 28 June, and El inquilino, censored by the Francoist authorities but now returned to the public and to historical memory just as its director José Antonio Nieves Conde originally intended.

Cinema Jolly – 9am and 9.30pm
Cinema and Resistance: Edge of Darkness and Mortu Nega
The collaboration between two men who shared Russian Jewish heritage – director Lewis Milestone and writer Robert Rossen – approached Nazism in the Norwegian resistance drama Edge of Darkness as systematic bullying and an outright exploitative cult. Flora Gomes’ Mortu Nega is an absolutely revolutionary film that embodies the same pressing need for “an intervention to rectify history and create a sense of discovery through transformation”, to quote Fernando Solanas.

Cinema Arlecchino – 2pm  |  Piazza Maggiore – 9.45pm
Homage to Indian cinema: the restoration of Sholay in Piazza Maggiore
Fifty years after its release, we are hosting the world premiere of the restoration of an Indian cult classic, Sholay, in the director’s cut, which includes the original ending and two previously removed scenes. A resounding success in its homeland (it remained the highest-grossing film for nineteen years), it is an epic curry western that mixes action, drama, romance, comedy and tragedy, complete with song and dance. It will be presented by producer Shehzad Sippy, nephew of director Ramesh Sippy, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director, producer and founder of the Film Heritage Foundation, which carried out the restoration in collaboration with Sippy Films. During the afternoon – at the screening of the Satyajit Ray masterpiece Aranyer Din Ratri – Shivendra Singh Dungarpur will be presented with the Vittorio Boarini Award 2025 for his commitment to the preservation and promotion of cinema heritage.

Piazzetta Pasolini – 7pm
Not just books… under the stars: Georges Simenon. Otto viaggi di un romanziere and La morte di Auguste
Not just books about cinema. Friday’s presentation does not feature a filmmaker, but a novelist: Georges Simenon, whose multitudinous points of contact with cinema and TV have proven him to be an author capable of traversing the boundaries of expressive language. Journalist Michele Smargiassi and writer Luca Ricci will introduce Georges Simenon. Otto viaggi di un romanziere (Cineteca di Bologna, 2025) – the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to the life and work of the Belgian novelist, curated by John Simenon and Gian Luca Farinelli, currently running at Galleria Modernissimo – and the first Italian-language edition of La Mort d’Auguste (La morte di Auguste, Adelphi, 2025), a Simenon novel first published in 1966.

Sala Mastroianni – 10.30am and 11.30am
Women of 1925
Both of the appointments from our A Hundred Years Ago section are dedicated to female filmmakers, and they confront two very different, yet equally impressive, socially-conscious independent productions: behind The Red Kimona, a morality drama about the dangers of prostitution, lies the trio of producer Dorothy Davenport, journalist and author Adela Rogers St. Johns, who wrote the story based on a real-life incident, and screenwriter Dorothy Arzner; then there is Sprechende Hände, a touching documentary about a school for the deaf-blind by German filmmaker and political activist for women’s rights Gertrud David, which is paired with Le Vote des femmes, a Gaumont newsreel about a demonstration in Paris in favour of women’s suffrage.