In 1956, following a rare opportunity to screen the first film by Agnès Varda, André Bazin wrote: “La Pointe courte is a miraculous film, both for its very existence as well as for its style. In respect to its existence one perhaps needs to go back to Sang d’un poète to find a film as free in its conception from any commercial considerations. The total freedom of style allows us to feel the all-too-rare sensation that the only rules the film obeys are those determined by its author, without any outside influences.” Now, nearly sixty years since its creation, the purity and liberty of that film still speak to us, we the audiences of 2013. Could a film so stubbornly independent be made today? This is an excellent starting point to demonstrate that Il Cinema Ritrovato is not a festival of ‘old films’, consolations in one of the less appealing seasons for film viewers in recent memory (even if the Cannes Festival did provide a glimmer of hope), but rather the time of year to refresh our perspective. Navigating through the more than three hundred titles offered in this twenty-seventh edition, with its many events, its six theaters (including one of the world’s most beautiful cinemas, Piazza Maggiore), requires a careful study of the program so as not to miss out any of the numerous, unique opportunities provided by a festival that, alongside Hitchcock, Chaplin, De Sica, and Welles presents films little or never before seen, sought and researched for years in some instances, and finally rediscovered – films by Arne Skouen, Lino Brocka, Stellan Rye, Ol’ga Preobraženskaja… The catalogue you hold in your hands is an essential tool for considering what you should see.