“Il Cinema Ritrovato reminds us that cinema can be lost. The act of seeking is a long, often laborious, process: an impulse that can last a lifetime. On the other hand, acts which lead to forgetting and loss are abrupt, quick, haphazard. In a moment we realize that something has been lost and only then do we feelits painful absence. This is how it is with many things in Italy. This is what always seems to be about to happen to the cinema. My father, Luigi Comencini, had the seeker’s impulse all his life. When he was old, he used to say, ‘When I think about the cinema, I think of a child rummaging through the rubbish and finding a wonderful marble; he runs to his father and says ‘Daddy, look what I’ve found!!’. This is the cinema: showing what we have discovered’. And we should add, here in Bologna, what we have rediscovered.
This time, Dad, we have found you. A patient and persistent seeker – of lost silent films; of fragile and invisible characters; of tears withheld and of the minutiae of everyday life; of the country’s divisions; of children who are never listened to; of peasant fables; of our beautiful Italy, which is always on the verge of losing itself and which you recounted as a humble and disoriented seeker – the son of a Swiss German mother and an Italian father who were forced to emigrate to France. As an exile you always sought your homeland and you found it in the cinema, and you restored that land to us through the cinema.
When I think of your seeker’s impulse, I think that you did this job with the patience and persistence of a farmer who knows how to wait and to harvest, who knows when to give up and when to fight against bad weather for every one of his plants. This is how I see and imagine you: as a peasant-seeker, bent over the earth and the roots, searching for fables where the greatest magic springs forth from reality if you only have the patience to observe it for long enough. You sowed a great deal and we want to tell you that what you sowed still bears fruit – in the bleakest of seasons and in those who need it most. It is still bearing us fruit, like an unexpected flower in the middle of a field, or like that wonderful marble that a child finds in the rubbish”.

Francesca Comencini, from the Festival Catalogue; among the sections of Il Cinema Ritrovato: “Life first! The cinema of Luigi Comencini”