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. Of the several themes included, the programme will voyage through the fairy tales of the world, the Polish school of animation, a programme in collaboration with the La Rochelle festival; there will be classics such as White Mane by Albert Lamorisse and Heidi by Luigi Comencini, and finally, the “Cinemini” selection, presented by the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in Frankfurt.
Alongside screenings for children, Schermi e Lavagne introduces activities dedicated to young cinephiles. Students from the Conservatory of Rovigo have recently composed the soundtracks for a selection of Italian films from the 1910s, under the guidance of Daniele Furlati. The Cinema Ritrovato Young group will present a number of titles and produce video clips, interviews with guests and the audience, and film reviews. Schermi e Lavagne will organise, alongside the European Children’s Film Association, the first edition of the ECFA Workshop Warehouse, an initiative that will host approximately fifty operators specialised in film education and representatives of European festivals to follow a series of innovative workshops.

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. For this reason, we decided to join forces with the independent film institution Cinémathèque16 from Paris and jointly present a selection from its eclectic collection of vintage prints, which covers many aspects of this format: tinted silent films, early advertisments, scopitones, home-movie versions of famous horror features, trailers of lost silent films and artistic gems in fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. The second chapter of this year’s programme is dedicated to experimental filmmaking from Québec and the whole of Canada. The selection offers, among other delights, the opportunity to (re)discover the experimental works of filmmakers such as Joyce Wieland and Etienne O’Leary, who are represented each with an individual programme.
Curated by Karl Wratschko in collaboration with Cinémathèque16 and André Habib

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. Often dismissed as “quota quickies”, made cheaply to meet the new British film legislation, these were an invaluable school for the rising generation of directors who would blossom in the 1940s. Powell used to joke that his reputation couldn’t survive any more of his first twenty films being found. But with his reputation now secure, these reveal the origins of his irreverent humour, eye for topical issues, and growing skill with actors.
Curated by James Bell in collaboration with Thelma Schoonmaker and Ian Christie

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. Her aim was never to impose her own ideas, but to understand and support the projects and poetics of the authors with whom she worked. On the other hand, like any artist, she clearly possessed her own voice and personality, which this section proposes to trace through films that are very different in tone, genre and language. It is certainly a partial but undoubtedly fascinating selection, presenting significant works chosen from a rich and heterogeneous filmography that few other screenwriters can boast.
Curated by Masolino, Silvia e Caterina d’Amico

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) di Vittorio De Sica • Processo alla città (The City Stands Trial, 1952) di Luigi Zampa • Siamo donne (We, the Women, episodio Il cane da grembo, 1953) di Luchino Visconti • I vinti (The Vanquished, episodio inglese, 1953) di Michelangelo Antonioni • Peccato che sia una canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954) di Alessandro Blasetti • Nella città l’inferno (Behind closed shutters, 1959) di Renato Castellani • La contessa azzurra (1960) di Claudio Gora • Il lavoro (episodio di Boccaccio 70’, 1962) di Luchino Visconti • Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova Veneziano (Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence, 1969) di Luigi Comencini • Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl, 1986) di Mario Monicelli

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. Mamoulian was equally efficient in more sombre types of cinema, serving as a pioneering figure in both gangster and horror genres. This career retrospective showcases Mamoulian’s work from his only silent film, to the early sound period, to his final musical, in colour and CinemaScope. Aside from a new digital restoration of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, everything else will be screened in 35mm.
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht

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. Her image was somewhat eccentric, amid the glamour of the 1950s and her golden moment lasted just over ten years, but an actress such as Magnani is unimaginable today. The legacy and unattainable model of Anna Magnani continue to inspire actresses in Italy and beyond.
Curated by Emiliano Morreale

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! This year’s selection of Recovered and Restored really is a treasure trove, a festival within a festival: almost 90 films in number, with an age range of more than 100 years between the most recent, Inland Empire, and the oldest, L’Enfant des mariniers.
Renoir, Antonioni, Bergman, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Akerman, Wenders, Hitchcock, Hawks, Ozu, Lubitsch, Dulac, Bava, Lynch. We rediscover the masterpieces of famous filmmakers and get to know the less celebrated but equally exceptional works of Roemer, Manthoulis, Korda and Arnold. We retrace a century of cinematic visions through rarities and cult films (presented in the peak of their splendour), we cross genres, between births and hybridisations, we discover a plethora of gazes and themes (some surprisingly current).
Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli

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. Lindtberg was born in Vienna in 1902 and emigrated to Zurich where he began working in the theatre. In 1933, he also directed several of the most important films produced by Praesens, including the famous Die Letzte Chance (The Last Chance, 1945), which powerfully evokes the fate of Jewish refugees during the Second World War and won awards at Cannes and the Golden Globes, and Die Vier im Jeep (1951), which recreates the Allied occupation of Vienna and won the Golden Bear at Berlin.
Curated by Frédéric Maire

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. The Nazi takeover in January 1933 resulted in the end of the Jewish influence on popular German filmmaking. It also marked, for a great many Jewish filmmakers (including directors, actors, screenwriters and producers), the beginning of life and work in exile. In the film studios of Vienna and Budapest, they kept the vision of another kind of German-language cinema alive, a cinema less polished yet much more free-spirited, irreverent and adventurous than the one dominating Nazi screens. Like the musical comedies of the late Weimar Republic, these films are filled with catchy tunes, light-hearted romances, bumbling hucksters and at times a sense of melancholia that speaks of displacement and an uncertain future.
Curated by Lukas Foerster

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. She has received the German Camera Award three times, including the Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Mikesch’s two dozen directorial works, of which she is usually also the writer/producer, stroll freely between genres. Many of her films are documentaries, but their free form tends to break out into poetic experimentation, and they stand out especially because of the exquisite lighting and camerawork. This programme selects five films from the 1980s that exemplify her style of genre-bending filmmaking. These titles were inaccessible for years except in banged-up 16mm prints until Deutsche Kinemathek undertook the restorations.
Curated by Martin Koerber

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. Cinemalibero is also a story of banned films, censorship and masterpieces lost to regressive forces of their time, now finally brought back to life through painstaking but rewarding restorations. This year, through nine programmes, we’ll fork into three geographical areas: Central Asia, post-1967 Pan-Arab cinema from Lebanon and Syria, and Western Africa – each revolving around several world-premiere restorations, including, respectively, The Fall of Otrar (Gibel Otrara, Ardak Amirkulov, Kazakhstan, 1991); The Dupes (Al-Makhdo’un, Tewfik Saleh, Syria 1972); and Ceddo (Ousmane Sembène, Senegal, 1977), the latter part of a centennial tribute to the Senegalese maestro.
Curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli

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. This retrospective will showcase a rich and diverse selection of films, ranging from high-quality literary adaptations, to films about the performing arts, to unusual period dramas, which largely eschew violent action in favour of sophisticated historical analysis and intense personal drama. Drawing on recent restorations as well as vintage prints, the programme will highlight Kinugasa’s considerable abilities as a director of actors and the stylistic variety of his art, which ranges with facility from monochrome expressionism to colour pictorialism. It is time that this significant body of work emerged from the shadows.
Curated by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström. Co-organizer: National Film Archive of Japan

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. Documentary is anchored in reality; it tells us about the greatest social revolution of the last century, that of women, through the brilliant portraits of three female artists (the orchestra conductor Antonia Brico and two pioneers of cinema, Dorothy Arzner and Agnès Varda) and the unstoppable struggle for visibility of homosexuality in cinema. Documentary is an instrument of self-analysis through which cinema narrates itself, its own language; we explore the origins of the “cinematic truth” genre starting with the archives of Robert Flaherty, we retrace the Mexican period of Eisenstein, we immerse ourselves in the fluid gaze of Ghezzi, and we rediscover Godard’s legendary Canadian lessons. Cinema talks about cinema; cinema talks about us.
Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli

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. Up until now, time cruelly denied any opportunity to appreciate the talents and beauty of many of these great performers – almost nothing seemed to survive. The programme will include three newly found films with Diana Karenne (including The Two Sisters’ Tragedy, a short 1914 melodrama that she also wrote), the brand-new restoration of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs, two films with Berta Nelson (courtesy of the EYE Filmmuseum) and La tartaruga with Helena Makowska, rediscovered and preserved by the Cineteca di Bologna.
Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Tamara Shvediuk

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. The study of letters, invoices, handwritten notes and photographs revealed the workings of a career behind the camera spanning from 1905 to 1924, allowing us to establish, for the first time, a filmography of over 100 titles. All in all, Albert Samama can no longer be considered a marginal note in the history of cinema, an ephemeral and exotic presence: he was a pioneer, a leading figure of the early days of cinema and the first filmmaker of the African continent. Il Cinema Ritrovato is set to reveal, over the next few years, the extent and articulations of his legacy. We begin with a first selection of restorations – actuality films and newsreels – from the original negatives preserved by Gaumont Pathé Archives and a spectacular find from La Cinémathèque française. 
Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Cecilia Cenciarelli

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. This year we turn our attention to the exiled Russian filmmakers working at the studio Films Albatros in France, the birth of the western as a serious genre in Hollywood, the pinnacle of expressionist cinema in Germany, and the last embers of the diva film genre in Italy. Newsreel footage of the time, meanwhile, preserves major events for posterity on film, such as the Great Kantō earthquake devastating Tokyo or the discovery of Tut-Ankh-Amun’s tomb. The majority of the films in the programme will be screened on 35mm, but we will also present a handful of new digital restorations.
Curated by Oliver Hanley

Le Brasier ardent (The Burning Crucible, Braciere ardente, 1923) di Ivan Mosjoukine • Gossette (secondo episodio, 1923) di Germaine Dulac • La Maison du mystère (1923) di Alexander Volkoff • L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn, Albergo rosso, 1923) di Jean Epstein • Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary, 1923) di Sergei Eisenstein • Schatten, eine nächtliche Halluzination (Warning Shadows, 1923) di Arthur Robinson • Our Hospitality (Accidenti e che ospitalità, 1923) di John G. Blystone e Buster Keaton • The Covered Wagon (I pionieri, 1923) di James Cruze) • L’ombra (The Shadow, 1923) di Mario Almirante • La Montagne infidèle (1923) di Jean Epstein