Auditorium-DAMSLab – 12 noon
Cinema Lesson: Thierry Frémaux
Director of the Cannes Film Festival and Institut Lumière in Lyon, Thierry Frémaux is by now a regular guest at Il Cinema Ritrovato and his enlightening lessons always offer numerous valuable insights and reflections on the state of contemporary cinema, its various forms and accessibility. This year’s conversation with Gian Luca Farinelli, entitled Nouvelle creation, nouveaux public, promises to be no less enthralling.

Auditorium DAMSLab – 3pm and 6.15pm
Documents and Documentaries: King Kong and Caméra arabe
The Documents and Documentaries section takes us on an exploration of two cinematographic cultures, two distant and very different industries which represent the variety of souls that cohabit Il Cinema Ritrovato. Caméra arabe is a journey into the history of Arab cinema, through clips taken from fundamental films from its twenty golden years (1966 to 1986), allowing us to rediscover one of the cinemas that Western audiences are less familiar with. Engraved into the collective consciousness, King Kong is perhaps the very first myth invented by cinema, and he comes back to life in King Kong, le cœur des ténèbres. The documentary recounts the creation of the character by explorer-filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who gave life to an icon that remains undisputed even today.

Cinema Modernissimo – 11am and 6.40pm
The cinephile soul of Luigi Comencini
In addition to celebrating one of the key authors of Italian cinema, the section dedicated to Luigi Comencini also testifies to the importance of rediscovering and preserving cinematographic memory, demonstrated by the splendid anthology of the most significant early films deposited by Comencini at Cineteca Milano (which he also helped to found), introduced at Cinema Modernissimo by his daughters Francesca and Cristina: an homage to the cinephile soul of a director who was nurtured on the classics of the silent era. Memory is also at the centre of another film introduced by Francesca Comencini at Cinema Modernissimo, La ragazza di Bube: based on the Strega Prize-winning novel by Carlo Cassola and lit up by Claudia Cardinale’s performance, the film adaptation accentuated the book’s reflection on the Resistance, thanks to the use of flashbacks and Carlo Rustichelli’s melancholic score.

Auditorium –  DAMSLab and Cinema Modernissimo – 4.30pm | Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini – 7pm
Lucky to be a woman: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Mara Blasetti and Márta Mészáros
The book being presented in Piazzetta Pasolini is dedicated to the great Suso Cecchi d’Amico. Her daughter Caterina d’Amico and Francesco Piccolo have selected four of her more than 120 screenplays (including the one for the film by Blasetti which lends its title to the volume, La fortuna di essere donna e altre storie per il cinema, published by Einaudi) to paint a portrait of an author who literally wrote the history of Italian cinema. She is but one of the many female figures at Il Cinema Ritrovato – an aspect we will continue to emphasise until every talented artist from every era and latitude has emerged from the shadows to which they have been relegated by cinema history. As is the case with Mara Blasetti, the legendary Italian production manager, too often remembered only for her surname, to whom Michela Zegna has dedicated a portrait. Finally, we will be presenting three restored shorts by Hungarian director Márta Mészáros, from which her grace in narrating the most fragile human experiences in new and unconventional ways emerges.

Piazza Maggiore – 9.45pm
Terry Gilliam presents Brazil
“The location of Brazil is the cinema itself, because in the cinema the dream is the norm.” These are the words Salman Rushdie used to describe Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece, which will illuminate the night sky in the most beautiful cinema in the world, under the stars of Piazza Maggiore. And there is no better location to attempt to contain the wonder, the irreverent spirit, the taste for hyperbole of the ex-Monty Python: the brilliant Terry Gilliam is one of the special guests at this year’s festival, and in addition to presenting the film in Piazza Maggiore he will be the protagonist of a Cinema Lesson which promises to be memorable on Wednesday 25 June.

Cinema Arlecchino – 2.30pm
Il Cinema Ritrovato Young presents Yi Yi
Michel Ciment called it an “oeuvre-monde”: Yi Yi, the final film by Taiwanese director Edward Yang, is a family portrait recounted with clarity of style and narration and such richness as to be able to describe an entire society through the stories of its characters. The film will be introduced by Il Cinema Ritrovato Young, a group of twenty or so young cinephiles aged between 16 and 20, who, thanks to an educational project organised and run by Schermi e Lavagne, curate sections and present films in Cineteca di Bologna venues throughout the year. Over the course of the festival, they will also be producing video clips, reviews and interviews with festival guests and the public.

Recovered and Restored
A new day of Recovered and Restored in which to journey through the images of different genres, cinemas and historical periods. Starting off in Japan and Mikio Naruse’s post-war Ukigumo, a story of unrequited love that becomes a reflection on the sense of displacement experienced by an entire generation. Continuing with an excellent debut work, Max Ophüls’ Die verliebte Firma, and two appointments dedicated to the irresistible Laurel and Hardy. Alongside cornerstones of cinema history such as Sunset Boulevard, there’s also room for some of the most popular genres, from the turbulent western Duel in the Sun to the extreme thriller Non si sevizia un paperino. Not to mention an opportunity to rediscover Moi syn, the only Yevgenii Cherviakov film to have survived in its uncensored form, a story told through close-ups where the human face becomes, to use the words of its director, “the true centre of any lyric picture” and “the most perfect ‘instrument’ of production”.