Il Cinema Ritrovato
festival dedicated to the rediscovery of rare and little-known films
Il Cinema Ritrovato (lit. 'Cinema Rediscovered') is an annual film festival organized by the Cineteca di Bologna dedicated to the history of cinema, screening film classics and retrospectives, and showcasing the latest restored works from cinematographic archives and film laboratories around the world. It is widely regarded as one of the leading international events devoted to cinematic heritage.
History
The festival began in 1986 as a five-day symposium on film conservation organized by the Cineteca di Bologna, conceived by Gian Luca Farinelli, who has guided it since its earliest days and became director of the Cineteca in 2000. It grew out of the Mostra internazionale del cinema libero, a festival founded at Porretta Terme in 1960 by Bruno Grieco, Gian Paolo Testa, Leonida Repaci and Cesare Zavattini to show films outside conventional distribution, which ran until 1985.
For its first decade the audience was around 90 percent foreign, made up largely of academics and archive professionals. Attendance grew markedly after 2011, as the digitization of archives broadened interest in restored cinema. By 2024 the festival recorded 130,000 admissions, with accredited attendees from 72 countries; among events devoted to classic cinema, only the Lumière Festival in Lyon, launched in 2009, draws comparable numbers.
The Finnish critic and historian Peter von Bagh was artistic director from 2001 until his death in 2014. The festival is now led by four co-directors: Farinelli, Cecilia Cenciarelli, Ehsan Khoshbakht and Mariann Lewinsky.
Format and programming
The festival runs for nine days in late June, using eight cinemas in the historic center of Bologna together with open-air venues at Piazza Maggiore, Piazzetta Pasolini and the Arena Puccini, and screens close to 500 films.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2250346. Authority coordinates are 44.494, 11.343. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 2000, 1960 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Il Cinema Ritrovato” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.