Fernandel, a great french actor who worked quite a lot in Italy, once said that Italian censorship suffered from tapeworm, in view of its relentless voracity.

Today, after so many years, what should we do with the hidden and secret bequest left to us by now-suppressed censorship? With the cuts by which this tapeworm, in Fernandel’s words, devoured, disfigured, maimed films, but also somewhat forced filmmakers, both authors and the ones interested just in box-office results, to make their brain work in order to bypass its constraints?

Our project intends to consider censorship cuts from Italian cinema (Italian in a wider meaning of the word as we have included also foreign films imported in our country) as cultural heritage. Something which should not only be kept, catalogued and studied, but also reviewed and set up according to new forms of fruition which are tailored to our times and today’s media.

Searching for, ordering and screening the history of cuts made in Italian and foreign production films, from the post war period to a given time (which could be defined perhaps so that it may coincide with the onset and beginning of commercial TV in Italy) is a necessary and unavoidable step to take, and in our opinion, long overdue.