Dear cinephiles,

With just under three months to go until Il Cinema Ritrovato, this will be no ordinary edition: it will be our XL edition — meaning both the fortieth and, quite literally, “extra large,” given the abundance of films in the programme. Running from June 20 to 28, the festival will seek a delicate balance between glamour and ecstasy, commitment and struggle, dream and reality, past and present.
In addition to the eight theatres that will screen films and host events without pause, there will also be the usual open-air evening events: the rendezvous with “La Nonna” (the affectionate nickname we give our carbon-arc projector) in Piazzetta Pasolini, and the screenings in Piazza Maggiore, where one of the world’s largest and most passionate communities of cinephiles gathers. The magnificent Cinema Modernissimo remains the beating heart of the festival: all it takes is walking down its steps to escape the blazing June sun and enter the cool, enveloping darkness of our Art Deco jewel.
For those unfamiliar with the festival’s regular fixtures, the backbone of the programme consists of around ten sections ranging from early cinema to the most recent documentaries on film history. At its centre lies the festival’s very core: major and minor classics, forgotten and neglected works, guilty pleasures and canonical masterpieces; feature-length and short films; films for children and for those who once were children. Even films for which we can no longer quite say what age group they were originally intended for find their ideal place in Bologna. Because here, it is the films that seek out their audience, not the other way around.
All these programmes are curated by leading experts in their respective fields. And since cinema is only the starting point, not the final destination, the festival will also host talks, conversations and presentations featuring special guests and leading figures from the worlds of film restoration and preservation.

We have shared some of the key strands planned for the forthcoming edition, but there will be more – much more – to be announced in due time.