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Dear Cinephiles,

It is now just under three months until Il Cinema Ritrovato. And this will not be just another edition – it will be our XL (40th) edition, and X-large it will be in the abundance of films on offer. This very special edition, running from June 20 to 28, will strike a delicate balance between glamour and ecstasy, commitment and struggle; between dream and reality; between yesterday and today.
In addition to eight venues screening films and hosting events around the clock, there will be evening outdoor screenings: a rendezvous with La Nonna (“grandma”, the affectionate nickname given to our carbon arc projector) in the Piazzetta Pasolini, and the gathering point for some of the largest cinephile crowds anywhere in the world in Piazza Maggiore. The splendid Cinema Modernissimo remains the heart of the festival, and anyone can escape the intense June sun by running down the steps into the cool, dark, comforting embrace of this Art Deco gem.
For those unfamiliar with the festival’s regular features, a dozen strands – spanning from early cinema to the most recent documentaries on the history of film – form the backbone of the programme. In between lies the main body of the festival: major and minor classics, the forgotten and the rejected, guilty pleasures and canonical masterpieces of the moving image; short and long works; films for children, and films for those who were once children. Even films for which we have no idea what age group they were originally made for suddenly find their niche in Bologna. At our festival, films search for their audience – not the other way around.
All of these programmes are selected by leading experts in their respective fields. And since film is only the beginning, not the end, the festival will also feature panels, talks, and introductions by special guests and renowned figures from the world of film archives and restoration.
In this newsletter we have shared some of the key strands planned for the forthcoming edition, but there will be more – much more – to be announced in due time.

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Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen
In a light, sophisticated no-man’s-land (yes, largely inhabited by women) between romantic comedy, screwball, and pure Paramount aestheticism, the cinema of Mitchell Leisen comes to life. A former silent-era costume and set designer, Leisen became renowned for classics such as Easy Living, Hold Back the Dawn, and Midnight, and was the only Hollywood director to sign his name in his films’ credits. No auteur theory was needed to recognize his unmistakable qualities: an effortless narrative flow, impeccable design, and sparkling, innuendo-laced dialogue – sometimes written by Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, or Charles Brackett – alongside heroines as charming as they were uncompromising. In his films, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur radiated wit, grace, and razor-sharp comic timing. They twisted conventions as their encounters with men – often played by Ray Milland or Fred MacMurray – spiralled from mishap to romantic resolution. This tribute presents a selection of Leisen’s classics in restored versions (courtesy of Universal), alongside rarely screened archival prints.
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Photo: Hands Across the Table (1935) di Mitchell Leisen
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All She Desires: Barbara Stanwyck
Her ability to connect directly with an audience begins with the voice – lush, weary, tender, worldly, skeptical, ranging nimbly between hard and soft. It could be metallic, mannish and brittle or gentle as a down pillow, sometimes within the same film, as befits an actress who was at ease in every genre, from woman’s melodrama to the western, withnoir and screwball comedy in between. More iconoclast than icon, more a character star on the order of Bogie or Cagney, she was neither a great beauty nor a glamour puss. The importance of this – her refusal or inability to be simplified into a single image – has to be seen as a major factor in her longevity. If she was underappreciated in her time, her minimalist gifts – the fluid movement, the stillness in repose, the sense of interiority – have come to seem ultramodern. A cross-genre retrospective will showcase the many facets of this iconoclast.
Curated by Molly Haskell

Photo: Barbara Stanwyck , 1945
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Tribute to Luchino Visconti
Visconti was born in 1906 into a family that embodied the meeting of Italy’s past and future: his
father was a nobleman, while his mother was an entrepreneur. This dual heritage offers a key to
understanding his artistic vision – capable of bringing the performative traditions of the
nineteenth century to cinema, the art form of the twentieth. A revolutionary director of opera and
drama, he helped shape a generation of costume designers, set designers and screenwriters who
would go on to become legendary, and a group of actors and actresses who, under his direction on
screen and on stage, found the defining roles of their careers: from Delon to Callas, from Valli to
Lancaster, from Cardinale to Gassman, from Magnani to Mastroianni. Today we regard his
filmography as one of classics, often overlooking the profoundly experimental and exploratory
nature of his entire career. His first, astonishing, feature-length work, Ossessione (1943), was cut
and condemned by the Fascist authorities, and many of his later films were likewise the subject of
era-defining clashes with the censors. The fiftieth anniversary of his death offers an opportunity to
rediscover – also through important new restorations – his masterful ability to bring the past to
life through art, to create new relationships between music and images, as well as to continue to
speak powerfully to the present.
Curated by Caterina d'Amico

Photo: Luchino Visconti on the set of Bellissima (1951) © Paul Ronald
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Joséphine Baker, Renaissance Woman
Joséphine Baker was never just the woman with the banana skirt. She was a shockwave. Bursting onto the Paris scene of the 1920s, she carved herself into the collective imagination with a body in excessive motion, both fetishized and fiercely independent. Born on the streets of St. Louis, her art came from survival, improvisation, and jazz. Renaissance! Europe wanted “the jungle”, Baker brought the street, turning exoticization into both a weapon and a disguise. Her image, between nudity and animality, fed colonial fantasies, yet she constantly sabotaged them through exaggeration, grimace and refusal of stillness. Program showing full filmography: La Revue des revues, La Sirène des tropiques, Zouzou, Princesse Tam-Tam, Fausse Alerte, spiced up by a selection of newsreels from Gaumont Pathé archives and rarities.
Curated by Emilie Cauquy. In collaboration with La Cinémathèque française and CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée

Photo: Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) by Edmond Gréville
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Shadows and Steel: The Cinema of Daisuke Ito
This retrospective surveys the remarkable body of work of Daisuke Ito, whose directorial career spanned nearly half a century. For film historians, his reputation rests on his revolutionary contribution to the silent-era samurai film, when, breaking with the theatrical norms of early Japanese cinema, he brilliantly employed rapid montage and flamboyant camera movement to craft stylish action scenes while advancing trenchant social criticism. His postwar work, however, remains underrated. Working in collaboration with some of Japan’s finest actors, he ranged from the battlefield to the theatre to the world of shogi (Japanese chess), crafting stylish swashbucklers that recalled the visual exuberance of his silents, more austere, severe period dramas, and subtle, intimate character studies. One section of this retrospective gathers Ito's surviving silent films and fragments, presented, through the support of the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, with accompaniment by Japanese musicians and live spoken commentary by benshi narrators. Alongside these, a selection of his finest postwar films will be shown in high-quality 35mm prints, including some restored by the NFAJ from original nitrate material.
Curated by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordstrom. In collaboration with The Japan Foundation and NFAJ – National Film Archive of Japan

Photo: Oedo gonin otoko (Five Men from Edo, 1951) by Daisuke Ito. Courtesy of National Film Archive of Japan © Shochiku
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Century of Cinema: 1906
“Tramps attack cycling woman not knowing she is a professional boxer.” – “Child writes letter to dead father and is run over and killed on way to post”: The film plots of 1906 bear a striking resemblance to the celebrated news items published by Félix Fénéon that year. Our cinematographic news includes dramas of unprecedented sophistication by Albert Capellani and the very first productions of the Danish company Nordisk. The strand explores cinema's experimental drive, how audiences were drawn into an ever-increasing emotional engagement with the screen and how films reflect social realities such as racism and the ambivalence of misogyny and empowerment in the portrayal of women. Documentary footage of the San Francisco earthquake and the Courrières mining disaster in France bring news of terrible events of the past to the present. There are many more fascinating aspects of Early Cinema to be discovered in the sixty-plus titles, nearly all of which will be screened from 35 mm prints.
Curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko

Photo: Le Fils du Diable (1906) by Charles Lucien Lépine © Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé
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A Hundred Years Ago: 1926
For the 24th year in a row, Il Cinema Ritrovato devotes a portion of its programme to the cinema of 100 years past with a curated selection of films made and released in 1926. This year we’ll go mining for gold in the Yukon (by way of the Soviet Union) with Lev Kuleshov, witness the destruction of ancient Pompeii with Carmine Gallone and Amleto Palermi, make a Faustian bargain with the devil with F.W. Murnau, and visit two very different sides of Paris with Alberto Cavalcanti and Ernst Lubitsch. Enduring classics and canonical masterpieces are counterpointed by lesser-known (but no less brilliant) works such as Finnish director Teuvo Puro’s chilling, atmospheric Meren kasvojen edessä (Before the Face of the Sea). The programme continues to spotlight the work of women filmmakers with Karin Swanström’s “light summer film comedy” Flickan i frack (A Girl in Tails) and Lotte Reiniger’s seminal Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), the oldest surviving animated feature film. All, once again, supplemented by weird and wonderful fiction and non-fiction short subjects and newsreel clips.
Curated by Oliver Hanley

Photo: Die Tragödie einer Uraufführung (Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat) (1926) by O.F. Maue
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Great Small Gauge: Gunvor Nelson & Éric Duvivier
This year, we are excited to showcase the work of two exceptional filmmakers. The Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson (1931–2025) emerged from the vibrant experimental film scene on the US West Coast in the second half of the 1960s, before continuing her creative journey later in life in her native Sweden. Twelve films spanning the 1960s to the 1990s explore distinct phases of her work, including rhythmically structured films, personal films, her only narrative experimental feature, collage films, and, last but not least, two previously unreleased works. Historically, 16mm film was the predominant medium for scientific filmmaking, accounting for a significant portion of film archives, yet it is rarely seen on the big screen today. To address this, we will present six films from the 1960s and 1970s by the French filmmaker Éric Duvivier (1928–2018). Created outside the conventions of traditional art cinema, his works demonstrate how cinematic expression can flourish even within more rigid genres such as scientific film. His imagery also reveals an often overlooked chapter in the history of surrealist cinema, offering audiences a captivating glimpse into a singular artistic vision.
Curated by Karl Wratschko with Julia Mettenleiter (Svenska Filminstitutet), John Sundholm (Stockholms universitet), and André Habib (Université de Montréal)