Bologna's Rediscovered Cinema Festival Opens 40th
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- Il Cinema Ritrovato launches its 40th anniversary edition in Bologna on Saturday, a nine-day festival of more than 500 restored, rediscovered and overlooked films spanning over a century of cinema.
- Gian Luca Farinelli co-founded the festival in 1986 at age 19 with Michele Canosa and Nicola Mazzanti after discovering the Cineteca di Bologna's archives; he has directed the Cineteca since 2000 and is now one of the festival's four directors.
- Last year's edition drew a record 140,000 people to Bologna's Piazza Maggiore and surrounding venues, a similar number is expected this year, and Farinelli told the Guardian that younger streaming-era audiences are discovering classic cinema in person for the first time.
- The 1995 shift to a summer slot transformed the event from a niche classic-film gathering into an internationally recognized festival, drawing regular visitors including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Anderson and Alice Rohrwacher.
- This year's program features Yuri Ilyenko's 1965 surrealist film A Spring for the Thirsty, censored by Soviet authorities for alleged "ideological perversions" and only released in 1987, now restored by Fixafilm with the Dovženko Studio in Kyiv.
- Retrospectives will honor Luchino Visconti — including a restoration of The Leopard — alongside screen legends Barbara Stanwyck and Josephine Baker.
Why it matters: The Cineteca di Bologna's restoration laboratory, one of the world's most influential, has built its international reputation partly through the festival, while a streaming-saturated generation is rediscovering the appeal of communal cinema in a Renaissance piazza — a model that has scaled from a 19-year-old's pet project to 140,000 attendees while keeping its archival mission intact.
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