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

A milestone of visual flair and virtuosity in American cinema, the career of Lewis Milestone – a Russian Jewish émigré – bridged silent cinema and the 70mm spectacles of the 1960s. Renowned for having one of the most distinctive and eclectic styles of his generation, his popular and dazzlingly original work ranged from the anti-war magnum opus All Quiet on the Western Front to the popular-front musical Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. As dense, dark, and daunting as his films could get, they were often laced with wit, camaraderie, and bravery amid mass atrocities. Yet, he barely survived the Hollywood Blacklist, which forced him to drift into mediocre assignments. This programme, covering his silent films up until the Blacklist, features new restorations and archive prints, aiming to recover the artistry of a man who fought many battles of humanity in the 20th Century with a sense of wisdom and poetry that can still shake us.

Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht

There were peaks and valleys during Katharine Hepburn’s career—an Oscar winner one minute, “Box Office Poison” the next. In her case, the latter was a consequence of her always striking and sometimes controversial personality. She wore trousers and exuded a feminist vibe (her mother was a Suffragette) before most people were ready for it. The New England accent sometimes grated, but she was bold and “out there” in a way few women were—exhilarating, physically nimble, androgyne and lady rolled into one. There was a reason her career spanned 67 years and boasted a still-record number of Best Actress Oscar nominations (12) and wins (4). Her career was more varied than she’s given credit for but it’s especially her screwball comedies (of which there’s a touch in all her best work) that she shines. Unique and irreplaceable, we are able to appreciate in our own time this woman who was so ahead of hers.

Curated by Molly Haskell

One of the greats of Italian cinema, appreciated by audiences and critics, Luigi Comencini has nonetheless not received the full critical recognition his work deserves, nor has his name been placed among the highest echelons of Italian cinema. And yet, very few directors made as many important films across such a wide range of genres as Luigi Comencini. At a certain point labelled a “children’s director”, he undoubtedly gave us memorable films on childhood and the parent-child relationship: The Window to Luna Park, Giacomo Casanova: Childhood and Adolescence, Misunderstood, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Voltati Eugenio. However, Comencini also directed some of the best melodramas of the 1950s and some of the greatest of the Commedia all’Italiana genre. Although lacking the cynicism of many Italian directors, his view of society grew increasingly bitter in the 1970s, with films such as Somewhere Beyond Love, The Scientific Cardplayer and Traffic Jam. Perhaps it was this bitterness that pushed him to become an increasingly attentive and compassionate observer of childhood.

Curated by Francesca Comencini and Emiliano Morreale

Before becoming an actress, filmmaker, screenwriter, playwright and street acrobat, Coline Serreau studied the organ, musicology, then dance, acrobatics and, last but not least, trapeze artistry in Annie Fratellini’s circus school. She regularly frequented the Cinémathèque française, and doubtless saw the first Lubitsch retrospective in 1967. From 1969, wasting no time and refusing to be pigeonholed, Coline Serreau began enchanting audiences with her acting, her writing and as a director of theatre, film and opera. Sassy and as cynical as Diogenes, her oeuvre protests through comedy; in stormy weather, a Capra-Lubitsch approach is always the best antidote to base instincts. As far back as 1978 she said: “I like people to be playful and to question things. There are trends aplenty in men’s cinema, a new way of thinking. I refuse to be put in a ghetto and I’ll prove it. I have as much ambition as any man. Women are right to feel colonised, and be far more subversive.”

Curated by Émilie Cauquy and Mariann Lewinsky