Once again this year Cinephiles from all over the world will get the chance to enjoy discovering their favourite film, while navigating through the certainties of the cinematographic canon, the thrills of discovery and the guilty pleasures of Pratello POP.
Alongside classics, we will also be screening many early works by Masters of Cinema, such as John Ford’s The Scarlet Drop, unearthed in Chile, as well as the debut works of von Sternberg, Ophüls, Truffaut, Roeg, Tavernier, Burnett and Mann. But also mature classics by Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Wilder, Naruse, Kubrick and Cronenberg.
In addition to great directors, there will be countless sublime acting performances, such as Jean Seberg’s debut in Saint Joan, directed by Preminger, the incomparable Danielle Darrieux in The Truth about Bébé Donge, the explosive Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, the masterful Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Five Easy Pieces, Simone Signoret as never before seen in Les Mauvais Coups…
Recovered and Restored is the section that more than any other sings the praises of cinema archives and restoration laboratories, whose work allows us to see unknown films, such as the Soviet Moi syn (My Son), directed by Evgenii Cherviakov, the first version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Lowell Sherman’s The Greeks Had a Word for Them, Vernon Sewell’s delightful British thriller Strongroom, the films of married couple Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, two visionary and very modern artists, or four Mexican films brought to light by Filmoteca de la UNAM.
For thirty-nine years Il Cinema Ritrovato has been chasing the myth of colour in cinema and this year’s edition will be as packed as ever with vivid emotions: from experiments in Technicolor, such as King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models, to the colours of Sholay, directed by Ramesh Sippy, one of Indian cinema’s biggest ever successes, to the impossible journey into memory and its faded tones that is Wojciech Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod Klepsydra).
The seams of the cinematographic canon are bursting and the guilty pleasures of Pratello POP will only confirm this, from Arrapaho to Don’t Torture a Duckling, perhaps one of the greatest films about Southern Italy, to Rinse Dream’s Café Flesh, a brilliant post-atomic sci-fi porno, to sumptuous digital restorations of cult Hammer classics.
The selection of films at this year’s edition confirms that at Il Cinema Ritrovato the history of cinema is a living subject, but also that watching a film on a smartphone is not the same as watching it in a theatre, perfectly projected onto the big screen, together with a real audience. The screenings at the festival are all 5-star, and it’s not difficult to predict that everyone will be in Piazza Maggiore to enjoy the new Sony-Columbia 70mm restoration of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Long live Cinema!

Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli