Bologna’s specialized festival for forgotten films embodies the streaming generation | film

Bologna will be transformed into an open-air cinema museum on Saturday, as a nine-day festival dedicated to restored and rediscovered neglected films – some dating back more than a century – kicks off in the northern Italian city.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Il Cinema Ritrovato has evolved from its niche origins into an influential international gathering captivating a new generation of cinephiles.

Last year’s edition, which included a revival of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film “The Gold Rush,” attracted a record 140,000 people, who packed Bologna’s Renaissance square, Piazza Maggiore and other sites in the city’s historic center for screenings of film classics.

In an interview with The Guardian, Gian Luca Farinelli, who co-founded the festival and is now one of its four directors, compared the experience to “walking through the ruins of the past.”

It is expected that there will be a similar number of visitors this year. But it wasn’t always this way. The idea for the festival came up at the age of 19 with two friends from his film club, Michele Canossa and Nicola Mazzanti, after they became acquainted with the Cinetica Library in Bologna, a film library founded in 1963 that today houses a laboratory considered one of the most influential in the world for the restoration of films and documentaries.

Digging into Cineteca’s archives, the three friends “began to discover many things we didn’t know,” Farinelli said. “We wanted to find an audience to show this jewelry to.”

They found this audience shortly before Christmas 1986 when the first edition joined another film festival held at Cineteca’s Lumiere Cinema.

Eno Patalas, German film historian and pioneer of film restoration, brought the 1931 motion picture classic M and Metropolis, both directed by Fritz Lang, to the event.

“From the beginning it was clear that this was an exceptional field,” said Farinelli, who has been a director of Cineteca since 2000. “We also realized very quickly that there was a void in Italy – no one was really specialized in restored films, and so we created [Cineteca] plant.”

Although it grew steadily each year, Il Cinema Ritrovato remained largely the preserve of classic film fans until 1995 when the festival switched to a summer period. “This has made our work better known,” Farinelli said.

The regular presence of a group of international film directors, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Wes Anderson, as well as Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, also helped enhance its status.

In recent years, attendance has risen. “The other extraordinary aspect is that we’ve seen younger audiences explode,” Farinelli said. “For young people, the cinema of the past is a big surprise. Yes, they know it [streaming] Platforms and all series, but in Bologna they discover that cinema has a long history. They also discover the joy of watching movies together in an arena with other people.

More than 500 films from world cinema will be screened at the 40th edition of the festival, from silent films to films by Hollywood greats of the 1980s and restored films that have long been buried.

“This year we will be presenting many films that no one has talked about before, so it is like seeing a film for the first time,” Farinelli said.

Among these films is “The Thirsty Spring,” a surreal black-and-white film from 1965 by Ukrainian director Yuri Ilyenko, which was censored by Soviet authorities for its alleged “ideological deviations” before it was finally released in 1987. This will be its first significant showing after it was painstakingly restored by Fixafilm in collaboration with Dovzhenko’s studio in Kiev.

“I’ve seen a lot of movies in my life, but seeing this movie was shocking — I’ve never seen a movie like it before,” Farinelli said.

Retrospectives will be dedicated to Italian director Luchino Visconti, including a restoration of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), as well as screen legends Barbara Stanwyck and Josephine Baker.

“When someone organizes a festival, you can only hope that it will grow,” Farinelli said. “But what distinguishes Il Cinema Ritrovato is that it has grown while maintaining its principles – that is, going deeper and showing films but also the complicity of cinema history, its richness and its contradictions.”