The festival Cinema Rediscovered has just come to an end in the city of Bristol - UNESCO City of Film - (23 - 27 July 2025) with 80+ screenings and events combining screenings of newly restored films, rediscoveries and film-on-film rarities.

In the section Restored & Rediscovered, several titles come directly from Il Cinema Ritrovato's programme including Charles Burnett’s directorial debut Killer of Sheep (1977), a touchstone of the influential LA Rebellion movement.

From 6 to 31 August 2025 Cineteca Milano presents Il meglio del Cinema Ritrovato 2025 (The Best of Il Cinema Ritrovato). Films on the programme include Five Easy Pieces, The Paradine Case, Sunset Boulevard, L'horologer de Saint-Paul, Duel in the Sun, One Hour With You, Diabolik, Und Das Am Montagmorgen, Lifeboat and Aranyer Din Ratri.

For the full programme and more details: www.cinetecamilano.it/rassegna/il-meglio-del-cinema-ritrovato-2025

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140mila spettatori: Il Cinema Ritrovato festeggia una 39ª edizione in ulteriore crescita e si prepara alle celebrazioni per i 40 anni del festival promosso dalla Cineteca di Bologna, che nel 2026 si svolgerà dal 27 giugno al 5 luglio.

From 30 June to 6 July, Il Cinema Ritrovato continues in Piazza Maggiore and Cinema Modernissimo with a series of special guests and surprising films.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Mumbai, filmmaker and founder-director of the Film Heritage Foundation

Discover the highlights in tomorrow’s programme!

Boudjemaâ Karèche, Algiers, film critic and former director of Cinémathèque algerienne

On Thursday, June 26th in Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini the winners of Il Cinema Ritrovato Blu-ray and DVD Awards 2025 were announced. The competition was open to DVDs and Blu-rays released between February 2024 and March 2025 of critically acclaimed films made before 1995.

Discover the highlights in tomorrow’s programme!

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Un film totalmente sconosciuto con protagonisti Eduardo De Filippo e Paolo Stoppa torna alla luce: realizzato a cavallo tra gli anni ’40 e gli anni ’50 da Mario Baffico, Ombre vive era un titolo mai apparso in alcuna filmografia del grande Eduardo.

Discover the highlights in tomorrow’s programme!

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Metti 333 persone un martedì pomeriggio di giugno per vedere un film muto del 1929. Sono quelle che ieri erano in fila al Cinema Modernissimo per il nuovo restauro di Erotikon, diretto quasi cent’anni fa dal regista ceco Gustav Machatý.

Discover the highlights in tomorrow’s programme!

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Siamo sicuri di conoscere la cinefilia? Siamo certi che corrisponda alla pura e semplice conservazione del modello di spettacolo cinematografico del Novecento? Meglio dubitare.

Cinefilia Ritrovata è più che un blog, è un vero e proprio Giornale della cinefilia, che ospita riflessioni, notizie, recensioni, interventi, discussioni, approfondimenti, rarità, stimoli provenienti dalla comunità cinefila che stiamo costruendo.

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In onore del fondatore della Cineteca, i premi vengono attribuiti ogni anno a personalità internazionali che si sono distinte nella salvaguardia e diffusione del patrimonio cinematografico.

Terry Gilliam will be one of our guests at Il Cinema Ritrovato: tomorrow, Tuesday 24 June at 9.45 pm, he will be in Piazza Maggiore to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his cult film Brazil, in the new 4K restoration by The Criterion Collection and supervised by Gilliam himself.

Terry Gilliam will also be present at Il Cinema Ritrovato on Wednesday 25 June, when he will hold a Cinema Lesson at 7 pm at Cinema Modernissimo.

Discover the highlights in tomorrow's programme!

Discover the highlights in tomorrow's programme!

Sophie Seydoux : President of Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

The Il Cinema Ritrovato festival welcomes a rich lineup of guests. On Sunday, 22 June, the programme includes theatre director Bob Wilson, prominent French filmmaker Coline Serreau, and Italian directors Francesca and Paola Comencini, who will discuss the work of their father, Luigi Comencini, a key figure in Italian cinema. Also participating is filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, known for her distinctive voice in contemporary Italian film.

On Monday, 23 June, the festival will feature Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes Film Festival and a representative of the Lumière Institute, alongside Ciro Ippolito, an unconventional director whose film Arrapaho will be shown as part of the programme.

In the festival venues, 20 minutes before the screening starts we will create a Last Minute queue for Festival Pass holders who have not booked.

In Piazza Maggiore, Last Minute access begins at 9.15 pm from the entrance located between the screen and the corner of Palazzo del Podestà.

Reservations remain valid until 10 minutes before the start time of the screening, after which we will open and allow entry to the Last Minute queue. For security reasons, if there are still seats available, entry into the cinema is allowed up to 10 minutes after the start of the screening. Enjoy the film!

We are pleased to inform you that once again this year there will be a free shuttle service for all Festival Pass holders. The shuttle will connect the Lumière cinemas to the Cinema Modernissimo, and vice versa, with intermediate stops at the Arlecchino and Jolly cinemas.

Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna, 21–29 June) will open its first evening in Piazza Maggiore with a 70mm screening of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. On the 100th anniversary of its release, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush will also grace the square, alongside a tribute to Katharine Hepburn: Feminist, Acrobat, Lover.

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Il Cinema Ritrovato Young riunisce giovani cinefile e cinefili, di età compresa tra i 16 e i 20 anni, chiamati a proporre la loro personale prospettiva sul mondo del cinema. Come ambasciatori del cinema presso le nuove generazioni, gli Young presentano film che ragazze e ragazzi della loro età spesso non conoscono.

On Thursday 5 June, Ehsan Khoshbakht will be a guest of the San Francisco Film Preserve. During the meeting Online with SFPP, the co-director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival will talk about Lewis Milestone's exceptional body of work, including the film The Garden of Eden, recently restored by SFFP. Khoshbakht is the curator of the section Lewis Milestone: Of Men and Wars.

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The 22nd edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato – Blu-ray & DVD Awards is promoted by Cineteca di Bologna in the framework of Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival. It’s a competition that — in line with the festival spirit — celebrates old movies, restorations and rediscovers, in their home video formats. The competition is open to all films released in Blu-Ray/DVD and will take place during the 39th edition of the festival.

The competition is open to DVDs and Blu-rays released between February 2024 and March 2025 of critically acclaimed films made before 1995 (30 years ago). You can enter the competition by submitting up to 5 titles of your latest releases. Your DVDs and Blu-rays must reach Bologna no later than March 21st, 2025.

For more information

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Una consacrazione anche per il Modernissimo, che ha fatto innamorare il pubblico internazionale, con il nuovo ingresso inaugurato in occasione del Cinema Ritrovato. Una festa della cinefilia senza confini.

On Friday, June 28th in Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini the winners of Il Cinema Ritrovato Blu-ray and DVD Awards 2024 were announced. The competition was open to DVDs and Blu-rays released between February 2023 and March 2024 of critically acclaimed films made before 1994.

The jury, composed by Lorenzo Codelli, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Philippe Garnier, Pamela Hutchinson, Miguel Marías and Paolo Mereghetti (president) assigned the following awards.

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Anche quest’anno durante il festival Il Cinema Ritrovato presenteremo alcuni libri selezionati tra le uscite editoriali recenti e introdotti da autori, curatori e ospiti. Quattro appuntamenti ad ingresso libero per tutti, accreditati e non, nella suggestiva cornice di Piazzetta Pasolini, critici, studiosi e professionisti del settore dialogheranno attorno ai temi e ai personaggi a cui sono dedicati i volumi.

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Venerdì 21 giugno, il direttore della Cineteca di Bologna e co-direttore del Cinema Ritrovato Gian Luca Farinelli ha selezionato nove imperdibili appuntamenti, uno per ogni giorno del festival. Ha descritto la sua scelta a Benedetta Cucci del Resto del Carlino:

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Il Cinema Ritrovato Young riunisce giovani cinefile e cinefili, di età compresa tra i 16 e i 20 anni, chiamati a proporre la loro personale prospettiva sul mondo del cinema. Come ambasciatori del cinema presso le nuove generazioni, gli Young presentano film che ragazze e ragazzi della loro età spesso non conoscono.

Moving from cinema to cinema during Il Cinema Ritrovato has never been easier.

From Saturday 22nd June to Saturday 29th June a shuttle service by City Red Bus (an electric vehicle with 13 spaces) is available to all festival pass holders. The service will go between Piazzetta Pasolini and Cinema Modernissimo (and back) with four stops along the way in the vicinity to other festival locations. Consult the stops and the times of the shuttle on the website.

For the second year running, we are pleased to have Wim Wenders with us as a guest during Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. The director has a busy festival schedule, from presenting his own films and restorations, to talking about films by other authors. Here are all the events where Wenders will be present at during Il Cinema Ritrovato:

With another edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato done and dusted, we look at the musicians who made numerous screenings and events more than special. Each artist brought their talent and creativity to the stage, enriching the screenings with their extraordinary musical performances.

They accompanied the silent films of the 1903 and 1923 sections, and not only in the cinemas, musicians took to the stage in Piazza Maggiore and Auditorium Manzoni in front of thousands of spectators with the screenings of Stella Dallas by Henry King and Lady Windermere's Fan by Ernst Lubitsch.

The 37th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival has come to an end and we can rightly say that the art of cinema is not dead. With a 12% increase in spectators across the festival venues – almost always sold out – and approximately 5,000 festival pass holders prevailing from 51 countries worldwide, Il Cinema Ritrovato and the Cineteca di Bologna bring to a close another special edition of the festival. On the ninth day, the final screening to see out the festival was David Lynch’s A Straight Story, shown on Piazza Maggiore’s big screen. A post-festival programme of restored classics will be shown in the coming days in Piazza Maggiore, including the poster film of the festival Quién sabe? on Tuesday 4th July at 9.45 pm.

The second edition of the award named after the founder and long-time director of Cineteca di Bologna, Vittorio Boarini, a pioneer in the field of restoration, a scholar of contemporary cinema and art, an educator, critic and infectiously energetic disseminator of culture who passed away in 2021. The award is given to international figures who, like Vittorio, have distinguished themselves in the safeguarding and diffusion of cinema heritage.

On Thursday, July 29th in Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini the winners of Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards 2023 were announced. The competition was open to DVDs and Blu-rays released between February 2022 and March 2023 of critically acclaimed films made before 1992.

The jury, composed by Lorenzo Codelli, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Philippe Garnier, Pamela Hutchinson, Miguel Marías and Paolo Mereghetti (president) assigned the following awards.

At Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023 a page of film history is about to be rewritten, a page relating to the world-renowned diva, Gina Lollobrigida. From the depths of a hidden suitcase, much like in a fairy tale, have emerged what we could call the mythical Lollo's debut as a protagonist: three song-films of which there is no written trace in filmographies, an assortment of vintage video-clips, shot by Pietro Francisci between 1947 and 1948.

Due to the bad weather on the evening of Friday 30 June, the screening of Lady Windermere's Fan, which will be accompanied by the Teatro Comunale orchestra, will be moved to the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni, start time at 9.45 pm.

A second screening of Lady Windermere's Fan, accompanied on piano by Daniel Sosin, will be shown at Cinema Arlecchino with the start time of 10.15 pm. 

The 37th edition of the festival promoted by the Cineteca di Bologna dedicates a retrospective to the director Jonathan Nossiter: after the world premiere at the Cinema Ritrovato in 2020, Last Words returns to Il Cinema Ritrovato on Saturday 1 July, at 9 pm. 30 at Cinema Lumière, the final event of the tribute to Jonathan Nossiter that will open today, Thursday 29 June, again at 9.30 p.m. at Cinema Lumière, with the screening of the film Sunday, directed by Nossiter in 1997, presented by the director himself and by a special guest: the actor Matt Dillon.

Il Cinema Ritrovato – DVD Awards is promoted by Cineteca di Bologna in the framework of Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival. The competition is open to all films released in DVD/Blu-Ray and will take place during the 37th edition of the festival.

The competition is open to DVDs and Blu-rays released between February 2022 and March 2023 of critically acclaimed films made before 1993.

Wim Wenders, revolutionary director of New German Cinema, maker of atypical documentaries and great cinephile, will be a guest and a protagonist at this year’s festival Il Cinema Ritrovato for what are sure to be four captivating events.

Once again music takes centre stage (and centre screen) of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. A programme full of musical events, spotted around the festival venues. 

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Ha saputo raccontare il nostro Sud come pochi altri: i suoi documentari sul Mondo perduto, quel mondo in cui la pesca del tonno era una lotta corpo a corpo tra uomini e abitanti del mare, quel mondo in cui quegli stessi uomini scendevano agli inferi della Terra per estrarre lo zolfo, quei documentari, dicevamo, sono una delle testimonianze visive più preziose di un’Italia arcaica. Vittorio De Seta avrebbe compiuto 100 anni il prossimo 15 ottobre, e la Cineteca di Bologna lo ricorda presentando alla 37ª edizione del festival Il Cinema Ritrovato (24 giugno – 2 luglio) il restauro di uno dei suoi film più significativi, l’esordio al lungometraggio nel 1961: Banditi a Orgosolo.

In 2024, the production company Praesens-Films will be 100 years old. A unique case in the history of Swiss cinema, the company is still active as a distributor. It produced most of the national cinema’s biggest successes, including such popular films as Luigi Comencini’s Heidi, and conquered Hollywood. It also won no less than three Oscars, including one for the screenplay of Marie-Louise (1944), written by Richard Schweizer and directed by Leopold Lindtberg, which deals with the French children hosted in Switzerland during the war.

This year, the sisters of cinema have a strong presence on both sides of the camera. We would like to draw your attention to an eye-opening retrospective: the tribute to Suso Cecchi d’Amico, lovingly curated by her children. It is a family insight into a professional career comprising contributions to over 120 screenplays that infinitely enriched the golden age of Italian cinema and beyond. As the only female screenwriter in Italian cinema, she was a master of field research, studying ordinary people, and coming up with lines, situations and character sketches that stemmed from the daily realities she persistently observed and turned into words. She showed an immaculate understanding of the different shades of life, its agonies and its joys.

Between 1930 and 1939, when Alexander Korda teamed him with Emeric Pressburger for The Spy in Black, Michael Powell had returned to a wintry England from his apprenticeship with Rex Ingram in the south of France and became part of the British production renaissance.

On the occasion of the 37th edition of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, from 23 June to 23 July 2023 there will be a 20% discount on all Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna titles (excluding titles published in the last six months).

Il Cinema Ritrovato Kids – a section curated by Schermi e Lavagne, the Cineteca di Bologna’s Educational Department – offers our younger viewers a journey through time and space: an eight-day programme filled with approximately thirty films, creative workshops, shows and concerts.

Now in its 20th anniversary year, the One Hundred Years Ago section continues its annual exploration of a single year in cinema’s rich and varied history with a selection of enduring classics and archival rarities as well as thought-provoking documentaries from 1923.

Waiting for Il Cinema Ritrovato, our short feature with selections of not to be missed films and events continues with In the Mood for Love. Four classics, four passionate stories of love, from 1920s Hollywood to the troubled relationships of Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity. Fall in love with cinema, fall in love with love.

Monday 26th June, 9.45 pm, Piazza Maggiore

Wednesday 28th June, 6.15 pm, Sala Scorsese

Wednesday 28th June, 9.30 pm, Cinema Arlecchino Thursday 6th July, 9.45 pm, Piazza Maggiore

Monday 26th June, 11.00 am, Cinema Jolly Sunday 2nd July, 3.45 pm, Cinema Arlecchino

Last year we presented a series on German musical comedies, 1930-32. Now we follow up on the fate and the continuing creativity of the talents involved during their exile years, by screening five German-language musical comedies produced in Austria and Hungary.

After celebrating 100 years of the 9.5mm format in the last year’s programme, we continue this year with another anniversary. 100 years ago, Eastman Kodak introduced the 16mm format as a less expensive alternative to 35mm film. The areas in which the 16mm format was and is used are very diverse.

“You have no reason to fear the dead. They sleep very soundly”. (Black Sunday)

Il Cinema Ritrovato paints its (cinema) doors black again, with a selection of the horror genre, from the depths of darkness to its greyer nuances. The choice on offer is rich and varied: from the nightmare tales of Black Sunday and The Tram (a look back at the birth of the Italian horror, with Mario Bava and Dario Argento) to the cults, such as The Wicker Man - The Final Cut and The House with Laughing Windows, even arriving at the aquatic visions of Revenge of the Creature and the dark comedy of Gremlins (act 1 and 2, the works of Joe Dante), to the noir-crime of I, The Jury. 

Get comfortable with Dante’s five hour work, The Movie Orgy, reminiscent of Ghezzi’s collage style, intertwining comic images with adverts and scenes of terror. Dream or nightmare, your choice. 

The horror thread travels through various sections of the festival programme and different locations, from Piazza Maggiore to Cinema Europa (the birthplace of Il Cinema Ritrovato 37 years ago), mainly found in the sections “Pratello Pop” and “Recovered and Restored”. 

Over the course of a career that began at the time of the birth of neorealism and lasted more than 60 years, Suso Cecchi d’Amico worked on the screenplays of more than 120 films (mainly, but not exclusively, Italian) directed by both newcomers and established directors.

This year too, Il Cinema Ritrovato will provide an extraordinary forum for exchange and discussion while also offering the opportunity to attend great film masterclasses; Wim Wenders, Ruben Östlund, Joe Dante, Luca Guadagnino, Barbet Schroeder, the iconic Nan Goldin, the director of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cinémathèque suisse Frédéric Maire, Masolino, Caterina and Silvia d’Amico – here to celebrate the legacy of their mother Suso and with Angela Allen, to remember Franco Zeffirelli on his 100 birthday.

In 1903 Méliès was at the peak of his art, creating wonderful gems such as Le Royaume des fées, a film destined to be the centrepiece of a programme made up of several genres, always with its fair share of short comedies and visual tricks. While British pioneers were contributing to cinema with their innovative spirit, in the US – see Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery – violence and plot-driven films were already happening.

From today onwards we are proposing a short feature with selections of not to be missed films and events dedicated to various topics. We start with Fluid Cinema, a quartet of films that cross gender stereotypes, from a documentary on film history and LGBT+ influences, to the comedy Peter, to a figure in German queer cinema, Elfi Mikesch, to Greta Garbo's historical portrayal of Queen Christina.

Saturday 24th June, 4.45 pm, Auditorium DAMSLab

Tuesday 27th June, 9.30 pm, Sala Scorsese 

Thursday 29th June, 2.30 pm, Sala Scorsese 

Wednesday 28th June, 4.30 pm, Cinema Jolly  Friday 30th June, 9.30 pm, Cinema Jolly  

Born in 1940 in Austria and working in Berlin since the 1960s, Elfi Mikesch is one of the most distinguished cinematographers in German cinema. Originally coming from the world of photography, she has worked in the cinema since the early 1970s. Besides shooting her own films, she worked as director of photography on more than 50 films by other directors, among them Werner Schroeter, Rosa von Praunheim, Monika Treut, Friederike Pezold, Heinz Emigholz, Cynthia Beatt and Teresa Villaverde.

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), an icon of feminist art, worked with a variety of mediums, from sculpture to painting to installation and also film. Born a French native, the artist moved and lived in various parts of the world, from a childhood and schooling in New York City, to the Balearic islands, where she was introduced to the architectural style of Gaudí, to Paris, where she met fellow artist Jean Tinguely, who would later become her husband.

One of the festival’s continuing strands, once again Cinemalibero will travel down the unpaved roads of cinema history to light up the powerful and unique work of maverick filmmakers unjustly denied admission to the canon of the greats; rediscovering films which, even when successful in their national cinemas, were barely recognised as masterworks outside the borders of their country of production.

After multiple viewings of  Albert Samama Chikli’s work in recent editions, we are ready to share some (spectacular) findings that have surfaced from the archives of this remarkable personality, now entrusted to the Cineteca di Bologna by his family.

This year’s selection demonstrates the vastness of the documentary genre, the value of its past and the possibilities of its present, and it brings together works that are seemingly distant in nature. The profession of documentary filmmaker is a dangerous one, a participatory narrative full of pitfalls: we discover this with Schroeder, an intrepid witness of the dictatorship in Uganda; with Roemer and his portrait of mafia violence; with Labudović, sent by Tito to fuel – through cinema – the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria.

The distinguished director Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982) stands in a paradoxical relationship to international cinephilia. While Crossroads (1928) and Gate of Hell (1953) were shown in Europe at an early stage, and while Page of Madness (1926) is recognised as an avant-garde classic, Kinugasa’s wider oeuvre is still barely known abroad.

Sometimes fate acts in unfathomable ways. Random findings in different places may end up shedding light on a specific subject, as though from on high. Between 2022 and 2023, Cineteca di Bologna, La Cinémathèque française and Gosfil’mofond of Russia, each of them individually, made several astonishing rediscoveries and carried out restorations of films featuring Diana Karenne, Ileana Leonidoff, Helena Makowska, who were among the main Russian actresses active in Italian silent cinema.

What does it mean to revisit the works of the great masters in their original splendour? It means renewing the love of cinema, reading the passion of the author between the lines, amplifying the pleasure of being a spectator in the darkness of the theatre. Without any interference. Let’s start with some good news: there haven’t been this many restored films since before the pandemic!

Known for his ability to encode his vision in light, movement, and later in colour, the Tbilisi-born Armenian Rouben Mamoulian had one of the most consistent bodies of work in American cinema. Rightly celebrated for his invaluable contribution to Hollywood’s transition to sound, he both unchained the camera and used dialogue like a work of musical accompaniment. His mobile camera was envied and imitated, and his style is instantly recognisable for its sophistication, humour and erotic undertone.

Perhaps the greatest, certainly the most admired and imitated – not only was Anna Magnani unique, she was also a model of acting style and an Italian icon. After first presenting herself as a brilliant actress – thanks to the triumph of Rome, Open City – she subsequently diversified from the many incarnations of her popular Roman character to play very different roles, such as those in Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach or the monodrama The Human Voice (an episode in Roberto Rossellini’s L’Amore), to finally arriving in Hollywood and winning an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo.

Here is the image that will guide us into this year's Cinephile's Heaven: Lou Castel, Klaus Kinski, Martine Beswick and Gian Maria Volonté, with their eyes fixed on the horizon. A shot taken by Divo Cavicchioli on the 1966 set of Quién sabe? by Damiano Damiani (with thanks to Centro Cinema Città di Cesena and the film rights holder Surf Film).