Il Cinema Ritrovato returns to the most magnificent cinema in the world, Piazza Maggiore, joined by the new screen at LunettArena. Three restorations will give us a taste of the festival to come: the Lynchian nightmare of Mulholland Drive (2001), the prophetic social portrait of Una bella grinta (1965), with its director Giuliano Montaldo in attendance, and Jean Renoir’s splendid Les Bas-fonds (1936), introduced by Nicolas Seydoux.
Tuesday 20 July we enter the heart of the festival, and in Piazza Maggiore that evening past and present meet in a celebration of peasant culture: Alice Rohrwacher will present Omelia contadina, a cinematic contemplation on the destruction of the agricultural landscape co-directed with the artist JR, followed by Il mulino del Po (1945), Alberto Lattuada’s adaptation of the great Po Valley epic written by Riccardo Bacchelli.
We will share our evenings with two other illustrious guests: we will take a dip with Volker Schlöndorff and the dazzling couple Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in La Piscine (1969), while Nanni Moretti will describe the creation of La Cosa (1990), his historic documentary about the crisis of the Italian Communist Party. And that’s not all: we will encounter the moral dilemmas of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in the classic A Place in the Sun (1951), Orson Welles’ deceptive truth in his F for Fake (1973), the love triangle between Mastroianni-Vitti-Giannini in Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia (1970) and the ambiguous madness of Nightmare Alley (1947), one of the greatest flops in film history. Among the many surprising films is also François Truffaut’s first masterpiece in its much-anticipated new restoration: what better view than the starry sky above our open-air cinema for experiencing the freedom of that unforgettable final runaway scene of Les 400 coups?

Cine-concerts
Live music is one of the stars of our evenings. On 17 July Maud Nelissen’s Sprockets will kick off our concerts in Piazza Maggiore, transporting us to the Roaring Twenties of Clarence G. Badger’s comedy It (1927). Same decade and same genre: 22 July, the humorous elegance of Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon will be accompanied by the notes of the Matti Bye Ensemble. Not to be missed is the first event with the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna on 24 July: Vampyr (1932), Dreyer’s masterpiece and first sound film, accompanied by the music of Wolfgang Zeller restored and conducted by Timothy Brock. While a gloomy vampiric atmosphere fills Piazza Maggiore, the audience at LunettArena will be captivated by the (silent!) film debut of Enrico Caruso, an immigrant in 1910s Little Italy in Edward José’s My Cousin (1918), with musical accompaniment by Daniele Furlati, Guido Sodo and François Laurent. The breathtaking finale is Mario Fantin’s footage for Marcello Baldi’s Italia K2, a spectacular record of the first successful summiting of the second-highest peak in the world in 1954. Teo Usuelli’s original music, adapted and arranged by Daniele Furlati, will be performed by the Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, conducted by Timothy Brock.