Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026 | Films on Film (16mm & 35mm)

This year, Il Cinema Ritrovato will present more than 120 titles on celluloid, the majority in 35mm and a dozen in 16mm. These are the films to be screened on film:

Highlights from Il Cinema Ritrovato XL (Part III)

Tallinna Turg

Part three of what I – and, in some cases, colleagues I have spoken to – recommend from the 2026 edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. Parts one and two can be accessed here.

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La Grève des bonnes

Dir: Charles Lucien Lépine | France, 1906

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Les Effets de la foudre

Dir: Gaston Velle | France, 1906

For the Century of Cinema: 1906 series, Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko watched approximately 500 films and ultimately selected 64 to be screened across six programmes. The screenings are closely modelled on the way exhibitors of the period organised their programmes, recreating a rich variety of emotional and aesthetic effects by combining different forms of production, including comic sketches, dramas, féeries, and topical films.

Two major highlights are La Grève des bonnes and Les Effets de la foudre, both produced by Pathé Frères. In La Grève des bonnes [The Strike of the Housekeepers], working-class women fight against exploitative labour conditions, going so far as to beat up policemen. Les Effets de la foudre [The Effects of Lightning] is particularly remarkable for its inventive use of experimental techniques, including scratching the filmstrip with a sharp tool to create striking visual effects.

Highlights from Il Cinema Ritrovato XL (Part II)

Mudar de Vida

My favourite things: Personal recommendations and favourite discoveries from among the more than 500 films awaiting you at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026. Part one here. – EK

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Anémic cinéma

Dir: Marcel Duchamp | France, 1926

The only film directed by Marcel Duchamp – the early Dadaist, later Surrealist, and, much later, solitary painter and chess player – this classic of the weird consists of two alternating sets of images: one of rotating and interlocking geometric forms, amounting to a kind of cinematic pop art avant la lettre; the other of words and sentences inscribed on spinning discs. The film offers an opportunity to confront one of cinema’s most fundamental questions: what are space and time in film? The restored 35mm print may contain the answer.

Highlights from Il Cinema Ritrovato XL (Part I)

La Dérive

A selection of personal tips, recommendations, and favourite discoveries from the more than 500 films awaiting you at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026.

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La Dérive

Dir: Paula Delsol | France, 1964

Biased historiography haS long buried the work of this suppressed member of the French New Wave, who, alongside Agnès Varda, was one of the movement’s few female directors. Time to rediscover this favourite of Godard and Truffaut.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026: Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen

Mitchell Leisen showing Ray Milland how to kiss Jean Arthur. Publicity set photo from Easy Living (1937)

Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen

Il Cinema Ritrovao XL retrospective

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 recognise 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 Il Cinema Ritrovato tribute presents a selection of Leisen’s classics in restored versions (courtesy of Universal), alongside rarely screened archival prints.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025: Favourites & Discoveries

Artists and Models

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXIX concluded on June 30. With 140,000 admissions, the attendance was comparable to that of the previous edition. However, the scorching temperatures resulted in more foot blisters.

This survey is not a competition but a compendium showcasing what you missed so that you can catch up later. (195 festival attendees have voted.) Your local cinematheques and festivals might consider showing these films if you can convince them that the diversity and adventurous selection is essential for keeping film culture alive. (And good luck doing that!) Those who complain that some strands were not as rewarding as they expected miss an important point: if we do not screen these films, nobody else will.

The festival has screened Battleship Potemkin and One Hour with You, yet they do not appear in any lists. I would like to think this suggests that these films have already been seen and enjoyed as both favourites and discoveries. Still, one person’s obvious title may be another’s revelation. I see that as part of the excitement of what we do. So, please take this list as just a reference—nothing more and nothing less.

There is a sense of purpose in programming Il Cinema Ritrovato, even if it is not immediately apparent to an outsider. Everything is centered on reevaluating the history of cinema, and with that come our political and social ideas and biases. However, the framework is almost always aesthetic—a bad film about a significant subject remains a bad film. Duke Ellington once said there are two kinds of music: the good music and the other kind. In our case, we avoid the "other kind."

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025 | Films on Film

Summertime by David Lean, shot in Venice, in colour, on 35mm

Il Cinema Ritrovato shows more films on film — from 35mm, 16mm, and 70mm prints — than any other festival in the world. (If you have any doubt, ask FedEx or DHL.)

This year, 130 titles will be projected from celluloid. It's true that a good number of these belong to early cinema, but there is an equally substantial selection—from the silent period to the early 21st century—shown in archival prints and occasionally brand-new prints.

Here is a list of 50 titles to be shown on film that I think are worth adding to your schedule, once the schedule is out!

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025: Twenty Recommendations

Il Museo dei sogni

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXIX is just around the corner, and I think you should not miss these twenty titles:

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025 | Which Films Play in Each Strand

La ragazza di Bube

This is a list of the titles that will be screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato, excluding the 1905 and 1925 strands. The listings for the Documentary and Restored & Recovered strands are not exhaustive — more titles will be added later.

Lewis Milestone Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025

Milestone (left) on the set of Rain with Joan Crawford

Lewis Milestone: Of Wars and Men

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.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022 – Opening Speech

Screening of Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià [Shoeshine] at Arlecchino cinema

Among the whole range of trigger warnings that tend to appear at the beginning of films nowadays, there was one I saw recently that I found genuinely moving. 

It was a warning that only Aussie viewers are likely to be familiar with, addressing as it did the Australian Aboriginal peoples. It read: "This film contains images and voices of people who are no longer alive."

I needed to catch my breath. It awakened something in me in connection with this festival. What we do very often involves looking at and listening to the images and voices of the dead. Are we breaking taboos, upsetting long-lost souls?

And that’s not to mention film restoration, which brings those sights and sounds even closer to their origins, heightening the resemblance. 

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024: Favourites & Discoveries

70mm projection of North by Northwest in the Piazza Maggiore

The XXXVIII edizione of Il Cinema Ritrovato ran from June 22 to 30. In reality, it started a few days before the official date and stretched into one extra day at the tail end of it. Four hundred-plus titles were screened, from early cinema to documentaries made in 2023-2024, from great classics to obscure gems, from experimental films to pornography. This edition also finally saw the opening of the restored Cinema Modernissimo which now has turned into the heart of the festival.

5,700 from 72 countries acquired the festival pass, 700 higher than last year.

The title of all the films and moving images screened can be accessed here.

I asked some of the attendees about what they had taken from the festival. They generously sent me the titles they have liked and those they have discovered, or those they have rediscovered and now loved. 155 festivalgoers –  including curators, archivists, festival bums, film historians, 35mm fanatics, programmers, writers and critics – have responded to this call for building a new canon based on what we played this year.

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

Black & Tan

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

A programme by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June 2024)

Introductory note by Jonathan Rosenbaum

In 16 shorts made over a stretch of almost a quarter of a century (1929-1953), Duke Ellington and his Orchestra perform in a variety of settings, often with dancers and singers – including Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. The latter cuts freely between Ellington alone in thoughtful composing mode, Ellington in a tux performing the same extended composition with his band at a concert, arty images of men engaged in heavy labour, a wordless church sermon, a nightclub floorshow, and even a short stretch of story showing Holiday being pushed to the ground by an ungrateful lover before singing there about her misery – a near replica of the musical setup accorded to Bessie Smith in her only film appearance six years earlier.

Indeed, although the pleasures to be found here are chiefly musical, the narrative pretexts for these performances offer a fascinating look at how both jazz and Black musicians were perceived and expected to behave during the first three decades of talkies. At least half of the films are Soundies made for sound-and-image jukeboxes in the 40s, but even these often trade on narrative details such as the adoring women digging the solos by Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, Ben Webster, and others at an “eatery” after hours in Jam Session (1942), or the spectacular dancing by athletic jitterbugging couples in Hot Chocolate (Cottontail) from the same year.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024 | Almost All the Titles

Jean-Luc Godard at Il Cinema Ritrovato 1998

More or less all the titles to be screened during Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. There might be some titles listed more than once, as well as potential typos and incorrect attributions, all my mistake. Between features and shorts, we will present close to 500 titles produced in 35 countries and sourced from more than 140 archives. – EK

Guide to Kozaburo Yoshimura at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

Kozaburo Yoshimura

Guide to Kozaburo Yoshimura at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

By Alexander Jacoby

Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911-2000) is one of the neglected masters of classical Japanese film. An almost exact contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and Keisuke Kinoshita, he was responsible for some of the postwar Japanese cinema’s most compelling films, which bear eloquent witness to social change in a rapidly modernising country. But these are dramas above all, which grip and move audiences; as Tadao Sato wrote, they are “not mere social criticism, but films that flesh out the human element of the story”.

Anatole Litvak Retrospective | The Schedule

Anatole Litvak (in the middle) with his buddies Billy Wilder and John Huston

JOURNEYS INTO NIGHT: THE WORLD OF ANATOLE LITVAK

Viaggio nella notte: il mondo di Anatole Litvak

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

All the screenings at the Jolly cinema

The schedule subject to change until official announcement in early June

A couple more screenings will be added to other venues, including to Modernissimo's schedule

Where to Begin with Gustaf Molander | Jon Wengström​​'s Il Cinema Ritrovato Guide

Gustaf Molander

Jon Wengström​​, the archive Senior Curator of the Swedish Film Institute, has curated a programme dedicated to Swedish master Gustaf Molander. This retrospective will take place at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato in June 2024. Jon has blogged here, giving you some tips about what to see in that strand, that is if you don't want to see every single Molander which I think you should. – EK

Guide to Gustaf Molander at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

By Jon Wengström

Gustaf Molander made almost 70 films in a career that lasted more than half a century, and his trajectory as a director is parallel to that of the development of the Swedish film industry. He wrote the script to Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, 1917), which was the starting point of the Golden Age of Swedish silent cinema, and he directed the era’s epilogue with the Selma Lagerlöf adaptations Ingmarsarvet (1925) and its sequel Till Österland (1926). He was one of the very few Swedish directors who handled the transition to sound successfully, as proven by En natt (1931). During the 1940s, more than any other Swedish filmmaker, he made films that reflected the war and its aftermath, and after collaborations with a young Ingmar Bergman, including Woman Without a Face (1947), in the 1950s Molander made remakes of classic silent films in colour and Cinemascope, as a response to the advent of television.

Anatole Litvak Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato

Anatole Litvak with Deborah Kerr

JOURNEY INTO NIGHT: THE WORLD OF ANATOLE LITVAK

An unjustly overlooked master with an international career spanning six decades, Anatole Litvak made some of the most riveting and innovative films in the history of cinema that, save for a few titles, are hardly seen or discussed today. The Kyiv-born director of masterpieces such as L’Équipage and City for Conquest made films in Germany, France, UK and eventually Hollywood. This first-time overview of his dazzling career features films from all these bases of production, works that are ripe for rediscovery with their sweeping camera movements, long takes, ironic cutting, and splendid use of décor. Litvak’s films dive into a nocturnal world of flawed and unstable men and women whose identity crisis for Litvak reflects the crisis of the world between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War – a time of awakening and political turmoil that Litvak experienced first-hand.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023: Favourites & Discoveries

The 37th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato concluded last week but its memories live on. 

In Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957), a quintet of melancholic expats freshly returned from a seductive Paris to a drab shared apartment in Moscow start reminiscing about the joys of the high life in the French capital. Soon it turns into a competition in remembering. Getting too intense where disillusioned Marxist-Leninists accuse each other of stealing one another's memories, Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse), fervently dedicated to the equal distribution of all kinds of wealth, steps in and declares: "Comrades, there are enough memories for all of us." Judging from the range and diversity of this year's picks by festival attendees, it seems that we should not be too worried about running out of memories until next June.

Statistics tell me "120,000 spectators" have viewed "470 films [in] seven cinemas," a 12% increase in attendance compared to previous year. Feelings tell me billions of memories have been made.

Nearly 120 participants from 39 countries have picked their "favourite film" at the festival, as well as their "major discovery" this year. Some have accompanied their choices with additional notes. It's a delight to read.

See their picks below.

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Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII – The Films

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII – (Almost) All the Titles