Bologna’s niche festival of forgotten films captures the streaming generation

Cinema Ritrovato is held in Bologna’s Renaissance square, Piazza Maggiore, and other city locations. Photograph: Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna View image in fullscreen Cinema Ritrovato is held in Bologna’s Renaissance square, Piazza Maggiore, and other city locations. Photograph: Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna Bologna’s niche festival of forgotten films captures the streaming generation Over 40 years, Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – or ‘rediscovered cinema’ – has evolved into an influential international gathering Bologna will be transformed into an open-air museum of cinema on Saturday as a nine-day festival dedicated to restored, rediscovered and overlooked films – some dating back more than a century – gets under way in the northern Italian city. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Il Cinema Ritrovato, or “rediscovered cinema”, has evolved from its niche origins into an influential international gathering captivating a new generation of cinephiles. Last year’s edition, which included the resurrection of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film The Gold Rush, drew a record 140,000 people, who crowded into Bologna’s Renaissance square, Piazza Maggiore, and other locations in the city’s historical centre for screenings of film classics. View image in fullscreen Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film The Gold Rush drew a record crowd last year. Photograph: Cine Text /Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar In an interview with the Guardian, Gian Luca Farinelli, who co-founded the festival and is now one of its four directors, compared the experience to “walking through the ruins of the past”. A similar number of visitors is expected this year. But it was not always this way. Farinelli conceived the idea for the festival at 19 with two friends from his cinema club, Michele Canosa and Nicola Mazzanti, after being introduced to Bologna’s Cineteca, a film library formed in 1963 that today includes a laboratory regarded as one of the world’s most influential for the restoration of films and documentaries. Delving through Cineteca’s archives, the three friends “began to discover many things that we did not know”, Farinelli said. “We wanted to find an audience to show these jewels to.” They found that audience shortly before Christmas in 1986 when the debut edition joined forces with another film festival held at Cineteca’s Lumière cinema. Enno Patalas, the German film historian and a pioneer of film restoration, brought the 1931 cinema classic M and Metropolis, both by the director Fritz Lang, to the event. View image in fullscreen The cinema classical Metropolis was screened early on in the Cinema Ritrovato festival. Photograph: Album/Alamy “From the outset it was clear that this was an extraordinary field,” said Farinelli, who since 2000 has been the director of Cineteca. “We also very quickly understood that there was a void in Italy – nobody was really specialising in restored films, and so this is how we created the [Cineteca] laboratory.” Although it steadily grew each year, Il Cinema