A special thank-you to Pierluigi Raffaelli

Newsreels, documentaries, animation films (1948-1977)

Two years ago the Cineteca di Bologna undertook, in association with the Gruppo Galliardo as owners and rights-holders, an ambitious and demanding project to conserve and evaluate the collection of films produced by the Società Corona Cinematografica. This collection is important not only for its size (some 25,000 cans, relating to 3,500 titles) but above all because it enables us to revisit half a century of life, not only Italian, through images for the most part never seen, forgotten, or instantly disregarded by the television circuits. And treated with a certain disdain by a canon which considered the one-reel Italian documentary, produced in large part through then-prevalent government subsidies, as an appointment with boredom. This is certainly not the case. Società Corona Cinematografica was first listed in the register of companies of Rome in 1962. The company was liquidated in 1997. During these years, however, the company acquired films made by other production houses (such as Edelweiss, Gamma, Lumen Veritatis, Iris Film…) even earlier than the 1960s. Thus in the archive we find films made starting in the second half of the 1940s.

Very schematically, we can distinguish three main categories in Corona’s production: newsreels, documentary films, and animation films. The three programmes presented at the festival are individually dedicated to these subdivisions.

Claudia Giordani, Andrea Meneghelli, Giampaolo Parmigiani