For eight days even our budding cinephiles will have the chance to be involved in the festival, attending screenings, shows and workshops. This year Il Cinema Ritrovato Kids will pay tribute to claymation artist Fusako Yusaki and to Portuguese animation, with a programme curated by the Cinemateca Portuguesa; also, among others, a 1980s RSI-produced special on The world’s most beautiful fairy tales and a selection of animated shorts from two important festivals such as Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand. A series of workshops dedicated to animation and pre-cinema will enrich the programme.
Il Cinema Ritrovato Young – a group of young cinephiles aged 16 to 19 who programme a special series at the Cinema Modernissimo throughout the year – will be making their own selection of titles (that they will be also promoting and introducing), in addition to interviews with festival’s guests and audience, and video-reviews of the films.
Curated by Schermi & Lavagne

This year we present a rough guide through the developments and usages of colours in small-gauge filmmaking. The journey starts with tinted 16mm vintage prints from the 1920s and continues in the 1930s with amateur films. Thanks to lenticular colour motion picture processes like Kodacolor and monopack multilayer films like Kodachrome, colour became surprisingly more common in small-gauge cinema compared to commercial films made in 35mm. After the Second World War, colour film stock became also very popular in promotional and industrial films. From the 1970s onwards, colour in film had become an everyday phenomenon and no longer grabbed the attention of spectators like before. This might be an explanation why more and more innovative filmmakers like Bill Brand, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill and Christian Lebrat started to experiment with the possibilities of film colour to make them visible again.
Curated by Karl Wratschko in collaboration with Cinémathèque16, INEDITS & Lichtspiel/Kinemathek Bern

Work your way back, rewinding from Sois belle et tais-toi!, for the career of Delphine Seyrig is inextricably linked to her commitment to the feminist cause. An icon for cinephiles and feminists alike, she is more relevant today than ever. Over five screenings, immerse yourself in Fabienne Tabard by night (Baisers volés, 1968), take a stroll with the irresistible glitzy countess of Lèvres rouges (1971), and get to grips with rupture and social deconstruction in the company of activist friends, Chantal Akerman, Liliane de Kermadec and Babette Mangolte. Delphine forever, but especially now. “One thing I know is that in every role I play, I feel as if I have make myself less than I am. We need to write roles for women like those that were always written for men. This means roles to match Hamlet, or Macbeth; female characters who think, female characters who take action and who make you want to get involved in things and have an adventurous life.” (Delphine Seyrig).
Curated by Emilie Cauquy

Qui donc a rêvé (1966) di Liliane de Kermadec • Baisers volés (Baci rubati, 1968) di François Truffaut • Les Lèvres rouges (1971) di Harry Kumel • Sois belle et tais-toi! (1976) di Delphine Seyrig • Golden Eighties (1986) di Chantal Akerman • Calamity Jane & Delphine Seyrig, a Story (2019) di Babette Mangolte

Image credit: Archives Familles Seyrig et Roussopoulos / Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (Seyrig and Roussopoulos’ families archives / Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir)

An unjustly overlooked master with an international career spanning six decades, Anatole Litvak made some of the most riveting and innovative films in the history of cinema that, save for a few titles, are hardly seen or discussed today. The Kyiv-born director of masterpieces such as L’Équipage and City for Conquest made films in Germany, France, UK and eventually Hollywood. This first-time overview of his dazzling career features films from all these bases of production, works that are ripe for rediscovery with their sweeping camera movements, long takes, ironic cutting, and splendid use of décor. Litvak’s films dive into a nocturnal world of flawed and unstable men and women whose identity crisis for Litvak reflects the crisis of the world between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War – a time of awakening and political turmoil that Litvak experienced first-hand.
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht

In a career lasting half a century, director Gustaf Molander made more than 70 films in a variety of genres and styles and left a lasting imprint on Swedish film history. While Ingmarsarvet (The Ingmar Inheritance, 1925) is the epilogue to the Golden Age of Swedish silent cinema and on par with some of the more famous films from the era, the programme also includes examples of his brilliance in drama, film noir and comedy from the sound era in films such as En natt (Solo una notte, 1931), Kvinna utan ansikte (La furia del peccato, 1947) and Fästmö uthyres (Fiancée for Hire, 1950). Not just a versatile director excelling in different genres, Molander also had an extraordinary ability to bring forth the true potential in actors – in particular actresses. His films with the young Ingrid Bergman in the 1930s launched her to international stardom, but the tribute also provides a rare opportunity to see Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Inga Landgré and Gunn Wållgren in the early stages of their respective careers.
Curated by Jon Wengström

Films about cinema, recent documentaries and classics brought back to live on the big screen in their restored versions. Among the latter, the three short films shot by a young Stanley Kubrick in the early 1950s and four films by Lionel Rogosin, on the centenary of his birth, an exponent of the most explicitly socially-analytical and politically-critical offshoot of New American Cinema. There is no shortage of extraordinary portraits of masters of cinema (Powell&Pressburger, Lynch, Bellocchio, Demy and the “rebels” Léaud, Paradžanov and Landrián, Cuba’s first black director) and its stars (the divine Marlene and the legendary Henry Fonda, a reflection of America itself). There are also free and experimental works that explore the variegated world of cinephilia (such as Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! or the autobiographical Celluloid Underground), creatively repurpose archival material (Where Is Pessoa?), and contemplate the mystifying power of images, such as Felice Farina’s posthumous work Falso storico.
Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli

An internationally successful director who played a crucial role in key periods of Italian cinema history (neorealism, commedia all’italiana) and is beloved of filmmakers around the world (including those you would least expect, like Wes Anderson), Pietro Germi nonetheless came across as a surly, aloof filmmaker, whose vision of gender relations was considered to be politically incorrect and who was viewed with deep suspicion by the left-wing cultural establishment. It was only decades after his death that Germi was finally and rightly recognised as one of Italian cinema’s greats. His pessimistic vision of human relations took shape through a highly original reworking of genres: from the western (In nome della legge, the first film ever made about the mafia), to melodrama (Il ferroviere), noir (La città si difende), detective story (Un maledetto imbroglio) and a uniquely personal style of black comedy characterised by explicit and savage social critique (Divorzio all’italiana, Sedotta e abbandonata). Unlike many filmmakers of his generation, Germi never claimed to be an auteur and remained faithful to a vocation as a popular filmmaker. However, he is one of the directors who most consistently placed emphasis not only on a perfectly written screenplay, but on the mise-en-scène, the composition of the image, and the film’s rhythm.
Curated by Emiliano Morreale

Women’s subjugation within patriarchal society, both in a literal sense and as an allegory of a totalitarian regime; a backward journey to process family memories that become a collective political narrative; the condemnation of colonial repression and the celebration of culture and artistic expression an element of resistance and liberation – are among the themes that run through the works presented this year. Eleven brand new restorations, seven world premieres, will take us from the outskirts of Dakar to the womb of Manila, to the rural villages of southern Iran and western Syria, and again to the Indian region of Odisha and the island of Cape Verde.
Curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli

Marlene Dietrich has been celebrated, debated, photographed and, of course, shown on film to such an extent over the last century that, for many European and North American audiences, her first name suffices to introduce her. Notwithstanding all the angles history and cameras have taken on her, a thread runs through her work and life: Marlene Dietrich did not shy away from disrupting film and society – from challenging norms to her show-stopping presence on-screen that interrupts classical narratives to focus all eyes on her and her staging. Precisely these diverse challenges with which Marlene has confronted her audiences have let her be perceived as a role model to this day by different communities: Marlene was provocative as a working mother, as a bisexual star who practiced cross-dressing, as a fashion and style icon who created her own image, as an actress who intervened politically and took a clear stand for freedom, tolerance and democracy. In a selection of major films, this retrospective therefore explores Marlene as a disruptive force in cinema history.
Curated by Deutsche Kinemathek

Looking back at the cinema of 100 years past with a selection of canonical classics and lesser-known rarities from 1924 culled from the archives, including seminal films from France’s burgeoning avant-garde scene, Swedish master Victor Sjöström’s majestic Hollywood feature, He Who Gets Slapped, Karl Freund’s “unchained camera” at work in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, Gabriellino d’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby’s lavish adaptation of Quo vadis? that almost single-handedly bankrupted Italy’s film industry, plus a brand new digitization of Aleksandr Ivanovskij’s Dvorec i krepost’ (The Palace and the Fortress) offering a rare example of colour tinting in Soviet cinema, and a spotlight on the talented female filmmakers Nell Shipman and Lydia Hayward. As ever, the feature films are supplemented by weird and wonderful fiction and non-fiction short subjects as well as newsreel items that highlight some of the major events and key political and cultural figures of the year. And, of course, no One Hundred Years Ago programme would be complete without another thrilling multi-part serial.
Curated by Oliver Hanley

The late 1940s and very early 1950s saw a scattered production of films in which the worries of today and the pain and shameful memories of the recent past got discussed in stories set at the edges of Germany and Austria – in the rural far-away of the Alpine regions. In terms of genre, they’re rooted in what soon would be called Heimatfilm: movies set in specific landscapes whose people are seen as paragons of traditions needed to face the challenges of modern (city) life. But in contrast to the official Heimatfilm classics, these gems had more to do with film noir (Die Alm an der Grenze, 1951) or horror (Die seltsame Geschichte des Brandner Kaspar, 1949, by Josef von Báky); experimented with expressionism (Die Sonnhofbäuerin, 1948) and neorealism (Bergkristall, 1949) alike, and offered political opinions not at all in line with the official narratives of the day. Little known and shown even in their countries of origin, these films offer unexpected insights into a transitional period of Germany and Austria, their cinemas alike.
Curated by Olaf Möller

A Fabulous Year! While an impressive number of long and well structured documentaries were being produced by Pathé or Urban, technically open-minded clergymen were filming extensively in Egypt, Turkey and Palestine. Early industrial films show spectacular images of the Westinghouse Company in Pittsburgh/USA and the coal mines in Shirebrook/England; elsewhere, on the big screen, crude humour and frivolous eroticism remind us that in 1904 cinema was an integral part of popular culture. The Latest News! Current events such as theatres destroyed by fires, bomb attacks and the Russo-Japanese war, were being re-enacted. At that same time, cinema allowed audiences all over the world to enjoy the captivating performances of stars performing on the Parisian or Berlin stages, such as Mistinguett, Henry Bender and Les Omers. The ‘director of the year’ is Gaston Velle, a former magician who evolved into a most sophisticated filmmaker.
Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko

Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911-2000) is one of the neglected masters of classical Japanese film. He was responsible for some of the postwar Japanese cinema’s most compelling dramas, which bear eloquent witness to social change in a rapidly modernising and Westernising country. He began his directorial career at Shochiku in the 1930s and worked until the 1970s, but this programme will concentrate on his career in the 1950s, when his art was at its height. Working mostly at Daiei in fruitful collaboration with screenwriter Kaneto Shindo (himself also a distinguished director), he realised a sequence of gems such as Clothes of Deception (1951) and Undercurrent (1956) (the latter scripted by Japan’s leading woman screenwriter, Sumie Tanaka). These films earned him comparison with Mizoguchi for his sensitive exploration of female experience. Facilitated by the support of Kadokawa, Shochiku, The Japan Foundation and the National Film Archive of Japan, and featuring a new 4K digital restoration as well as vintage 35mm prints, this retrospective will highlight the beauty, power and relevance of Yoshimura’s cinema.
Curated by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström

Photo from Chijo © Kadokawa

For a filmmaker associated primarily with the South Caucasus, Sergei Parajanov made most of his films in Ukraine. After graduating from VGIK in Moscow, he became an employee of Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv. While in later life, he was prone to rubbishing his filmography up until Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the four features and three documentaries that preceded it present a very different but no less fascinating director. Bringing together a new restoration of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, scans from the Dovchenko Centre’s original camera negatives and rare 35mm archival prints, this program traces Parajanov’s creative evolution as a filmmaker and celebrates the filmmaker’s centennial.
Curated by Olena Honcharuk and Daniel Bird, in collaboration with Cecilia Cenciarelli

This year, even more so than in previous editions, we received hundreds of proposals for new and fascinating restorations. At the end of a lengthy selection process, we drew up a festival programme in which each and every spectator will be able to attain a state of cinematic bliss. Among the most anticipated events, the return, as never before seen, of a monumental and “invisible” work par excellence, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, of which we will screen, thanks to a decade of work by La Cinémathèque française, part one (3 hours and 47 minutes). The collaboration between Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation has brought about the restoration of some timeless classics of US cinema – The Searchers by John Ford and North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock – in 70mm, the  “glorious” format that doubles both the width of the film and the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen. That said, we will be keeping our passion for vintage 35mm Technicolor alive, with some extremely rare prints that the Academy Film Archive has released to be screened exclusively at our festival. We will also be celebrating one hundred years of Sony Columbia, a production company that has traversed (and made) the history of cinema. If you have the impression there are going to be too many Starred and Striped films, let us reassure you: you will also be able to watch the definitive restored versions of works by Yasujiro Ozu, Hans Fischinger, Carlo Rim, Akira Kurosawa, Carlos Saura, Jacques Demy, Mario Bava, Antonio Pietrangeli, François Truffaut, Miklós Jancsó, Seijun Suzuki, Satyajit Ray, Peter Zadek, Ester Krumbachová, Marco Bellocchio…
For the third year running, Pratello Pop will open the doors of Cinema Europa (where the festival was born 38 years ago) to cult and “alternative” films. Within the vast selection of silent films on offer, we would like to draw your attention to the Gaumont restoration of a 12-episode serial from 1916, Judex by Louis Feuillade, and a selection of Laurel and Hardy shorts from 1927, finally restored by FPA Classics.
We have received positive RSVPs from many special guests, friends, directors, colleagues and restoration professionals. Here’s one to start with: Wim Wenders will introduce two of his most emblematic films, Paris, Texas and Buena Vista Social Club.
Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli