The 34th edition or… Il Cinema Ritrovato year zero. The festival returns against all odds, rescheduled for a time of the year which is perhaps not as familiar to the festival audience as the original June date, yet no less sunny and inviting. Coming out of an experience as devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic, the desire to reconnect with life, the world and the arts is abundant. Cinema the way we know it — films on the big screen, viewed collectively — became an impossible experience for the longest stretch of time since the birth of the art form. This shook us all. We learned the lesson the hard way: yes, it can vanish. This edition, along with our usual mission, we aim to secure this much-needed re-encounter with the movies. Cinema, year zero.

This is our most unique edition yet. Covid-19 and the complications that came with it forced us to rethink the festival. With the health of the attendees as our top priority, we needed to come up with solutions to new problems. In an ironic turn, instead of shrinking the size of the festival, the pandemic actually led to enlarging it. To compensate for the restricted admittance to each venue, now we have ten venues hosting the festival, including three open air screening spaces, making it the largest edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato to date.

If you have read our previous announcement and see some strands or films missing here, it is because that due to the ongoing situation they couldn’t be realised as planned, and we have decided to postpone them. However, the majority of the previously announced programme is still intact and, in fact, since the last communication we have even added new films and retrospectives to the upcoming line-up.

Il Cinema Ritrovato’s programme is now available on the festival’s website.