‘Rarity’ is a word that is both vague and subjective. This section will investigate the term in four ways delving into Italian cinema, which still offers us vast terrain for exploration.
1. Shorts from the early 1950s that have not been seen for years and were shot, produced or starring big names of Italian film and entertainment (Zurlini, Blasetti, Maselli, Manfredi, De Sica & Zavattini…), all restored from flammable film. This program features six films with extremely diverse styles, themes and inspiration, but they all perfectly demonstrate how a filmmaker’s vision can be fully expressed even in a short film.
2. A feature length film that was released in theaters in a version that did not reflect the director’s intentions and is on screen here in a reconstruction as close as possible to the lost original that audiences never got to see. We are talking about the magnificent L’amore povero, one of the few feature films by Raffaele Andreassi, a director very dear to us and to whom we dedicated a special program three years ago. A reworked version of the film was released in 1963 with the titillating title I piaceri proibiti (Forbidden Pleasures) and met with little success.
3. Unique films you will not find in any film history book: the astonishing 16mm and Super8 footage shot with the patients of Professor Gustavo Gamna, director of the mental hospital in Collegno. They go beyond being strictly documentary, creating real journeys into the world of schizophrenia.
4. Several 1950s documentaries shot by skilful Gian Luigi Polidoro in the rugged landscape of Sardinia, among the traffic of the Venetian lagoon and of a Sicilian marionette theater. Aside from the extraordinary beauty of these films, we were also convinced by the unique quality of the materials available: films with clear signs of major spectacular impact (simultaneously using CinemaScope, Ferraniacolor and four magnetic tracks), which we are showing here in original 35mm copies, the very same ones screened for the first time seventy years ago.

Andrea Meneghelli