Dances With Wolves 4K Restoration to Premiere at Locarno
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- Dances With Wolves (1990) will receive a nearly four-hour 4K restored director's cut incorporating over 30 minutes of previously unseen material, premiering Aug. 7 at Locarno's open-air Piazza Grande.
- Cinegrell, the Zurich-based laboratory, restored the film in collaboration with the Locarno Heritage project and international sales agent K5 International.
- Locarno Film Festival officials called Costner's western "helped redefine the western at the turn of the 1990s and drew global attention to the historical plight of Indigenous peoples," noting it won seven Academy Awards including best picture and best director at the 1991 Oscars.
- Safi Faye's "Letter From My Village" (1975), recognized as the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African woman to receive commercial distribution, was also restored by Cinegrell and will screen in the same section.
- Roger Corman's "Frankenstein Unbound" (1990), starring John Hurt, Raúl Juliá and Bridget Fonda, and a tribute screening of Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata's 1988 "Grave of the Fireflies" round out the Histoire(s) du Cinema lineup.
- The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 5–15; artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said the program engages "cinema of the past with an eye to the new generations," with the full festival lineup to be announced July 9.
Why it matters: The restored director's cut materializes a long-rumored extended version of a seven-Oscar-winner that has been out of circulation since 1990's theatrical run, giving cinephiles and Costner completists their first chance to see the full cut — potentially reshaping the film's scholarly reputation. For Locarno, programming a mass-audience Western alongside Faye's historically significant African feature positions the festival as a curator of restoration-minded cinema aimed at younger viewers.
