Cinema Modernissimo – 12 pm
Festival Inauguration. Boarini Award 2025 to Sophie Seydoux
The 39th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato opens, as per tradition, with a meeting with the four directors of the festival – Cecilia Cenciarelli, Gian Luca Farinelli, Ehsan Khoshbakht and Mariann Lewinsky – who will present a Vittorio Boarini Award 2025 to Sophie Seydoux (Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé). Followed by, two comedies recently restored by Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé: Max boxeur par amour, directed and starring Max Linder, and Petrolini disperato per eccesso di buon cuore, one of only two incursions into silent cinema – long considered lost – by the great actor, cabaret artist, singer and writer, and brilliant interpreter of the Roman soul.

Cinema Arlecchino – 11.30pm
Molly Haskell introduces Christopher Strong
Sunday Cinema Lesson on Katharine HepburnMolly Haskell, one of the most influential American film critics, curated one of the most highly-anticipated retrospectives of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025, the one dedicated to Katharine Hepburn. Her book From Reverence to Rape revolutionised the debate on the role of women in cinema; therefore, we couldn’t but have asked her to introduce Christopher Strong. Not only does the film recount the conflict between love and work in a society where a woman’s independence isn’t to be taken for granted, it also saw the meeting of three great and talented women: Hepburn, in her first lead role, screenwriter and Pulitzer Award-winning playwright Zoë Akins and Dorothy Arzner, the most important female director working in the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s and 1930s. On Sunday 22 June, Molly Haskell will hold a Cinema Lesson on Katharine Hepburn, moderated by Imogen Sara Smith.

Cinema Modernissimo – 2.30pm and 7pm | Cinema Europa – 5.30pm
Family Matters: John Simenon, Francesca and Paola Comencini and Jane Fleischer at the festival
They have cumbersome surnames not of their choosing; however, they all chose to expend energy and passion in safeguarding and promoting the memory and work of their illustrious progenitors. John Simenon, Francesca and Paola Comencini (who will be joined by Cristina in the coming days) and Jane Fleischer will play leading roles at the opening day of the festival. Georges Simenon’s son, who co-curated the wonderful exhibition A Novelist in Eight Journeys, will give an evening lecture on the great Belgian author. The Comencini sisters, who have followed in their father’s footsteps, will discuss Luigi Comencini’s burning passion for cinema, which saw him – before becoming a celebrated master of Italian cinema – become one of the pioneers of European film archives, as testified to by his documentary Il museo dei sogni and later feature-length work La valigia dei sogni. Since 2021, Jane Fleischer, granddaughter of Max, has led an initiative to restore and promote as many of the films produced by the Fleischer brothers as possible: she will be at Cinema Europa to introduce a programme of shorts featuring some of the most popular characters created by the great American animators, from Koko the Clown to Betty Boop.

Sala Scorsese – 6pm
Coline Serreau introduces Pourquoi pas! and Le Rendez-vous
Since the start of her career Coline Serreau has demonstrated an innovative approach to the critical narration of society and has courageously tried to dismantle gender stereotypes. This double screening, introduced by Serreau together with Émilie Cauquy, one of the curators of the section dedicated to Serreau, demonstrates this perfectly: the short film Le Rendez-vous lucidly depicts the contradictions imposed on women, from obligations of motherhood to social expectations, while the French director’s first feature-length work, Pourquoi pas!, addresses issues that were still taboo for French cinema at the time, such as bisexuality and polyamory. After unjustly slipping into oblivion, it’s high time we rediscovered it!

Cinema Jolly, Cinema Arlecchino and Sala Scorsese – 9.30pm | Cinema Modernissimo – 10pm | Cinema Europa – 10.15pm
A Night at the Festival
Dine early, and above all frugally, as the late-evening menu on the first evening of the festival is a truly gargantuan one. Cinema Jolly and Sala Scorsese are screening Of Mice and Men and Holiday, some of the first chapters in the retrospectives dedicated to Lewis Milestone and Katharine Hepburn.
For the rock-and-rollers out there, Cinema Arlecchino proposes the astonishing and highly unorthodox Performance, the debut work by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, almost a documentary about Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg featuring an outstanding soundtrack, a cult movie and an explosion of freedom and creativity. Cinema Modernissimo hosts Komissar, a pacificist masterpiece from the 1960s, which the Soviet authorities made disappear and which was only ‘thawed out’ during perestroika. Lovers of science fiction will be spoilt for choice: Close Encounters of the Third Kind as never before seen – a spectacular 70mm screening of the brand new Sony restoration of the director’s cut – or The Planet of Apes, the first chapter of one of the most successful sci-fi sagas in cinema history. Ladies and Gentlemen, place your bets!

Recovered and Restored
Among the many restorations on offer during the day, we would like to highlight a number of films that are pure distillates of the era in which they were made: The Greeks Had a Word for Them, a cynical and fun “three-girls movie” that condenses the elegance of the Thirties with the freedom of the pre-Hays Code days, about a trio of former showgirls who get by on whatever they manage to squeeze out of any rich man who ends up in their sights; or Lifeboat, Hitchcock’s 1944 address to the “home front”, an apologue about having to choose a side during the war; or El inquilino, which in 1957 portrayed, by way of humour, a still poor and backward Spain. Heavily censored by the regime upon its release, the new restoration finally permits us to see the film as originally intended by director José Antonio Nieves Conde. From Francoist Spain to Turkey of the 1930s, with the precious rural drama Aysel, Batakli Damin Kizi, from a screenplay by the poet Nazım Hikmet, based on a story by writer Selma Lagerlöf. At Pratello Pop, Mario Bava’s action film based on the comic book character Diabolik, the ruthless and unstoppable thief born of the imaginations of the Giussani sisters.

Documents and Documentaries
The festival opens with two precious portraits of artists. In David Lynch: A Hollywood Enigma, Stéphane Ghez recounts the creativity of the director of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and his conflictual relationship with Hollywood; an ideal culmination to the section Il Cinema Ritrovato dedicated to him in 2024, Paradjanov, le dernier collage reconstructed the surprising and Chagallian personality of the Armenian filmmaker a few years after his death, with contributions from, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Tonino Guerra. Another film about cinema, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, retraces the legendary and complicated production of the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece, taking the recollections of his wife Eleanor as its starting point. Finally, Die Kopfjäger von Borneo, the final work by Friedrich Dalsheim, a master of ethnographic cinema.