So this is Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato XL 2026

What is Il Cinema Ritrovato? A few years back at a Bologna dinner, an important person with far more right to speak on these matters than I have, announced that for them, Il Cinéma Ritrovato was not a festival, but a museum. They spoke eloquently, and sincerely, but honestly I think that is a nonsense. Il Cinema Ritrovato, which has just closed its largest ever, “XL” edition, at the age of 40, is a festival in every sense of the word.

Il Cinema Ritrovato is a celebration, it’s true – so it is a festival according to that fluffy definition. Sitting with the crowds watching classics in Piazza Maggiore or encountering rarely seen gems in the Cinemalibero strand will convince you of that – of the love for cinema that animates all the action. Ritrovato is place of joy, of friendships and new connections. A pleasure to attend, even in a heatwave.

And it is also a festival in the business sense. Deals are done here, new work is presented here. Every film projected here reveals the story of its journey to these screens: the hallmarks of a vintage print presented by archivists, or introduced by critics and academics, restorations by preservationists, which take the form of newly minted DCPs with explanatory notes. glossy studio logos, or the Cannes Classics laurels. Then there are seminars and workshops that provide much more detail… the labour and expertise that brings these films to the cinema is made visible, and duly acknowledged. Even if you are here only for the art of cinema, that privilege is afforded you by all this work.

The films shown here next make their way to new festivals, to Blu-rays to repertory programmes and into new scholarship. And those Blu-rays must subsequently be entered into the Blu-ray awards. Then there are the articles and blog posts. The business of the festival must be recorded. The minutes of the meetings taken. And so even this report is part of the business of the festival, in its own partial way.

So here it comes: some of what I saw in Bologna, and what I thought of it. Thoughts worthy of a blog post, maybe. A museum? Definitely not.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)

Sunrise after sunset

No finer way to start a festival than with a masterpiece. OK, Il Cinema Ritrovato has the advantage over more traditional festivals here: greatness guaranteed. FW Murnau’s Hollywood marvel Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) lit up the Piazza Maggiore on the first Saturday, in a truly beautiful new restoration by San Francisco Film Preserve, presented by Rob Byrne and Kathy Rose O’Regan, and accompanied live by Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, playing a new score, composed and conducted by Timothy Brock. All week there were three questions on everyone’s lips: Did you see Sunrise? Wasn’t it wonderful? Did you get a fan? SFFP has strong merch game. The film is magnificent, and there is more to come. SFFP are restoring multiple versions of the film. Expect to see it on a big screen, and a Blu-ray, near you in the new year.

I saw one more silent film in the Piazza Maggiore: attempting to cool off with the spooky, snowy Finnish silent Noidan Kirot (1927, Teuvo Puro), accompanied with real verve by The Cleaning Women. Only a slight chill was sensed though. Nothing can fight the heat of Bologna in a heatwave. Though a Sunrise fan helps.

The silent programme was huge this year. First, the big news is that the estimable Mariann Lewinsky is retiring from the festival. A great loss, but she will be replaced by Emilie Cauquy, who has been responsible for some of my favourite silent screenings over the years. I saw several films in Lewinsky’s 1906 strand, and almost all of Tamara Shvediuk’s Matinee Idols series: I loved Wallace Reid, but not especially Sick Abed (Sam Wood, 1920), adored a rewatch of leonine JM Barrie adaptation Male and Female (Cecil B DeMille, 1919), with Thomas Meighan and the goddess Gloria Swanson, and stunning costumes designed by one Mitchell Leisen (see below). I was hugely taken by a Rudolph Valentino picture I had not seen before: Moran of the Lady Letty (George Melford, 1922) – which had all the beauty and gender ambiguity one craves from Rudy, but less of the blockbuster bombast associated with his more famous films.

Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926)

It is Valentino’s year of course, the centenary of his early death, and there was plenty here to remind us of 1926 – not least Oliver Hanley’s Cento Anni Fa strand, bursting with classics. Faust, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Flickan I Frack, so many hits. I especially enjoyed a mixed programme featuring one of my favourites: Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), and also a very striking actuality of a train line across Vietnam, La Ligne du Yunnan de Laokay a Yunnanfu (1925), and an avant-garde film of a market in Tallinn, Tallinna Turg (1926), all beautifully accompanied by Meg Morley and Alice Zecchinelli. That was very special.

And in a first for Ritrovato, a few of the films in the Daisuke Ito strand, curated by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström, had benshi accompaniment. The two fragments that I saw – Chokon/An Unforgettable Grudge (1925) and Zanjin Zanbaken/Man-slashing, Horse-piercing Sword (1928) – were terrific. Elsewhere Julie Linquette provided spirited verbal accompaniment to early French silents. I especially enjoyed Aladin ou la Lampe Merveilleuse (Albert Capellani, 1906) in the Piazzetta with Gabriel Thibaudeau and Frank Bockius, and La Fée Carabosse ou le Poignard Fatal (George Méliès, 1906) with Thibaudeau and Zecchinelli.

The silent strand burst at the seams. I was intrigued by what has been fund of lost German comedy Liebe Macht Blind (Lothar Mendes, 1924), with Conrad Veidt as the hypnotiser, not the hypnotised, and Emil Jannings as… Emil Jannings. The print was in fairly bad shape but Neil Brand gave this extra energy at the keys,

Mirages de Paris (Fedor Ocep, 1933)

So this is Paris?

So… my one contribution to the programme this year was to write a short note on one of those Cento Anni Fa films, Ernst Lubitsch’s marital misadventure So This Is Paris (1926), a sparkling comedy set in… Paris, Hollywood. You know – the city next door to Paris, Paramount, the one Lubitsch swore blind was superior to Paris, France? I jest. As usual there was a Parisian flavour to a view of my hits this year. Chief among them was Rien que les heures, but also a new favourite. the sparkling, surreal comedy Mirages de Paris (Fedor Ocep, 1933), which was something akin to the lovechild resulting from a union between Boris Barnet and René Clair on the banks of the Canal St Martin. Madcap comedy as a young bumpkin gamine comes to the city to be a star and learns that notoriety will take her further than talent – advice she unwittingly follows. All garnished with flashes of montage magic. Delightful.

Chance plays a big part in what you see and how you see it. Had my flight not been cancelled due to storms forecast in England, I would not have stayed on until Tuesday and been able to see a bonus screening, of comedy Ich Küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (Robert Land, 1929), starring Harry Liedtke and a young Marlene Dietrich, as a waiter and a divorcee falling in love in Paris. I saw and liked this before in Bologna but I liked it even more this time, especially with the new score from Daniele Furlati and the Ensemble della Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Modena. And then I got hit by the storm, that night, after dinner: a truly dramatic downpour, complete with thunder and lightning. That was the real grand finale to my festival this year: a short, sharp, break in the heatwave – and God’s way of telling me to go home and/or write that blog post I owe everyone.

I guess Georges Méliès’s side-splitting The Hilarious Posters from 1906, with its “mort aux flics” graffiti and animated billboards is also set in Paris? I loved it, so I will include it here.

La Dérive (Paula Delsol, 1964)

Wandering women

I did also look beyond the capital. One of the films I enjoyed most this year was a French provincial summer fling. I always try to prioritise seeing films directed by women at Ritrovato. One of my first stops was the comprehensive, beautiful Agnès Varda exhibition in the Modernissimo gallery (her 1980s classic Vagabond played the Piazza Maggiore), and one of my favourite films in the festival was directed by one of her New wave peers: Paula Delsol. La Dérive (1964), offers a small-town Cléo (a feline Jacqueline Vandal) drifting from lover to lover, a fugitive femme on a quest for independence, and love, in that order. Delsol writes, directs and produces this film, which I had never seen before, but is so strikingly modern, so gorgeous, that I was delighted to see it in a new restoration from Cinématheque Française. La Dérive was garlanded at Cannes but had since fallen out of circulation. I highly recommend you catch it when you can.

In a similar vein, there was much excitement over a Greek film, Eva, directed by Maria Plyta in 1953. The faithless Eva is an adulterous wife, stifled by a summer spent in a beach house on a Greek island, neglected by her spouse, but very much excited by the arrival of a mysterious young man, fresh off the boat. This was a beautifully sun-kissed film and a real pleasure, newly restored by the Film Foundation. Amazing how many lost gems by female filmmakers turn up each year.

For a wayward woman in the comic vein, you need not look any further than the miscreant heroine of Luigi Comencini’s La Bugiarda (1965), which translates as The Liar. This was the tonic I needed after learning my flight home had been cancelled, although the constant references to air travel made me flinch. Catherine Spaak plays Maria, ingeniously balancing the attentions of two lovers by claiming she is cabin crew and in the air for half the week. Until she is found out. Wayward then, but grounded, as she never boards a plane. I felt seen, and then I laughed my head off.

I am not sure that sweet Christa (Dorothy Wilson) the pregnant schoolgirl at the heart of ensemble Pre-code Eight Girls in a Boat (Richard Wallace 1934, restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Packard Humanities Institute) really qualifies as a wandering woman, but this Germanic comedy set in a Swiss boarding school was charming, and almost very progressive. Bonus points for the indelible presence of Baby Peggy herself (almost) all grown up, as one of Christa’s classmates. And the intro by David Stenn.

Swing High, Swing Low (Mitchell Leisen, 1937)

Leisens to thrill

If we have made it back to Hollywood, and the Pre-codes, then it is time for two of the most popular programmes of this year’s festival, even if I barely sampled one of them. We have become accustomed to Ritrovato offering one Hollywood strand devoted to a celebrated star, in this case Barbara Stanwyck, which was curated by Molly Haskell, and another to an undersung director: this time Mitchell Leisen, in a programme from festival co-director Ehsan Khoshbakht. Now, I know my Stanwycks, but I would have happily watched every single film in the programme, twice over, had there not been too many other things to see. Instead I restrained myself to a single, sublime screening of Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930). So beautiful. Stanwyck really has guts and heart and beauty and grit to spare.

Then I hungrily raided the Leisen fridge. I already knew a few of these, chiefly Midnight and Easy Living, two near-perfect films, but I gladly took this chance to taste many, many more. In the hands of designer-turned-director Leisen Fred MacMurray seems to thrive in romantic comedy, whether opposite Carole Lombard as a feckless trumpeter in Panama in Swing High, Swing Low (1937), or an engineer then a soldier opposite Claudette Colbert in No Time For Love (1943), and Practically Yours (1944) respectively. And Joan Fontaine, of all people, proved hilarious as a hapless mother in another JM Barrie adaptation, Darling How Could You (1951). I also rewatched the high-fashion psychobabble musical Lady in the Dark (1944) starring Ginger Rogers, just to revel in the BFI’s glorious Technicolor print. I really loved the Mexican border drama Hold Back the Dawn (1941) starring Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland and Paulette Goddard, in particular. And I was tickled byt the ticking-clock premise of murder-mystery revue Murder at the Vanities (1934), in which the corpses must appear, and the culprit produced, before the curtain falls.

I didn’t entirely gel with Death Takes a Holiday (1934), but I loved what it was programmed with: a Leisen-directed episode of The Twilight Zone, starring Ida Lupino as a faded 1930s film star who retreats from the outside world, preferring to lose herself in back-to-back screenings of her own back catalogue. Shunning the daylight outside to immerse oneself in old movies? I can’t see the harm in that. After all, it’s just good business.

See you next year.