Il Cinema Ritrovato is a festival celebrating classic cinema — but not only that… Completing the programme, are the contemporary flims in the section “Documents & Documentaries”, a priveleged investigative space dedicated to the rediscovery of filmmakers and films that have left a lasting mark on the history of cinema, curated this year by Bruno Deloye and Gian Luca Farinelli.

We may never before have received such perfect documentaries as those featured in this edition: authentic lessons in cinema, including tributes to James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, two twentieth-century icons whose lives had yet to be explored with such depth, skilfully using images and footage that capture the private lives and performances of these cinema “deities”. The same can be said for the documentaries on Cocteau, Franco-Russian actress Marina Vlady, the extraordinary career of script supervisor Angela Allen, cinema critic Marco Melani, and Pierre Henri Deleau, the visionary behind the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. Among the documentaries likely to most astonish festival audiences are Rubika Shah’s exploration of Hitler’s men in Hollywood between 1932 and 1940 and David Gregory’s journey into Paris’s Grand Guignol – two shining examples of cinema’s power to bring stories overlooked by mainstream historians to light. The section also includes previously unseen material on Pasolini, the discovery of Croatian documentarian Aleksandar F. Stasenko, two remarkable films by Giuseppe Bertolucci, and the works of the celebrated American photographer Elliott Erwitt – who also proves himself a talented director – further confirming that the American documentary school enjoyed a remarkable creative peak until the early 1980s. And last but not least, some news worth celebrating: high-quality TV programmes about cinema still exist, particularly in France, such as Blow Up and L’Image originelle.