Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026

In its 40^th year, the organisers of Il Cinema Ritrovato gave us something they’ve never given us before. It is customary to experience live music at the festival’s numerous silent film screenings, but this year the Japanese silent-era films in the programme were also accompanied by live benshi narration. In this traditional practice, a narrator stands to the side of the screen and describes events to the audience, while providing the character’s unspoken dialogue. I watched Daisuke Itō’s Jirokichi the Rat (1931) in this way, and benshi Ichiro Kataoka brought so much colour and nuance to his descriptions of the action and his delivery of the characters’ words, it almost made me forget I was watching a silent film. Combined with the music by Katada Kisayo, Kawashima Nobuko and Gabriel Thibaudeau, the presentation of live subtitles, and the 35mm projection, it was also a reminder of how thrillingly alive screenings at this festival can feel. The standing ovation these performers received from the audience in the Modernissimo was well-earned.

Daisuke Itō was the latest less-heralded figure to be celebrated in the festival’s ongoing Japanese focus. A prolific writer and director whose work spanned six decades, Itō remains a relatively unknown filmmaker in the west, but the seven features that I saw were extremely illuminating. What struck me most about Itō’s work was how mobile his camerawork was. He loves to generate energy through his camera, enlivening static situations, and in fact this tendency earned him the nickname "Idō daisuki" (Loves Motion) from the earliest days of his career.

At times, I felt that Itō’s grasp of storytelling – in terms of delineating characters and motivations – was his least impressive facet, but he keeps the pacing tight and in each film he puts together at least one standout sequence. I’m thinking of the pivotal shogi match in Ōshō (1948), where he accentuates the tension as Sakata (Tsumasaburō Bandō) ponders his killer move while his family beats their prayer drums rhythmically in support; or the remarkable thunderstorm sequence in The Lion’s Throne (1953), where a terrified young boy begs to be released from the basement while his mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) coldly ignores his cries; or the astounding final twenty minutes of Five Men from Edo (1951), which subverts our expectations of this brewing conflict, before climaxing in a face-off between two samurai from which there can be no winner. This ending appears to be typical of Itō’s sensibility, as he often tells stories about characters who are bound by codes and traditions that lead them to an inescapably bleak fate.

That’s certainly the case in my favourite of the Itō-directed films I saw in Bologna, his epic 1961 film The Conspirator. This was a project he nurtured for a decade, and out of all the films programmed in this season, it was the only one to be filmed in widescreen and in colour. The impact is staggering from the opening minutes, especially on one of the best 35mm prints I saw at the festival, with Itō staging a battle scene that reminded me of Kurosawa’s Ran (1985). The story that he tells is impressive in its scope and psychological nuance, as he follows a man trapped between two warring clans by virtue of his complicated lineage. It’s a grand, absorbing tragedy, building towards an agonisingly extended scene of seppuku, which ends the film on a desperately sad note.

If Itō’s work was a bit too doom-laden and oppressive, then a sunnier alternative was offered in the festival’s Mitchell Leisen strand. I’d seen many of Leisen’s most popular films already, but I enjoyed making discoveries here too, even if the results were mixed. Practically Yours (1944), Darling, How Could You! (1951) and Young Man with Ideas (1952) all had their moments, and Leisen is always gets fine work from his actors, but all three scripts feel a little thin or uneven, and I don’t think Leisen did a great deal to elevate patchy material. The standout discovery in this season for me was the least Leisen-like film of them all. Amid all of the elegant, witty screwball comedies that we associate with Leisen, we had Cradle Song (1933), his first directorial credit, and a film that has been out of circulation for decades.

Cradle Song is a story of motherhood set inside a convent, with an abandoned baby being taken in and raised by the nuns. Sister Joanna (Dorothea Wieck) forms a particularly maternal bond with this child, which helps to fill the void of the family she left behind to follow her vocation, and by the time Teresa (Evelyn Venable) has grown to adulthood, the pair share an incredibly close bond. Inevitably, the time comes where Teresa becomes curious about the world outside of the convent walls, and this is where the emotional weight of Cradle Song starts to accumulate. Sister Joanna must prepare herself to lose her daughter to the real world – a world she can never enter – and to once again sever the bonds of family. It’s a very basic narrative, but it was the simplicity and purity of Cradle Song that moved me. Leisen’s handling of the drama is graceful and understated, and he pulls off some beautiful shots; notably a wonderful reveal when light floods the room and unveils the nuns to Teresa’s husband-to-be.

Mother-daughter relationships are also at the heart of Gunvor Nelson’s work, but as I watched a series of her films on 16mm prints, I was taken aback by the variety of ways she found to approach this theme. In Schmeerguntz (1965) she uses dazzling and witty collage effects to contrast the santised media depictions of womanhood with the reality of pregnancy, housework and cleaning up shit; In Kirsa Nicholina (1969) she movingly records her friend giving birth in uncompromising detail; in Red Shift (1984), her multi-generational story is given added texture through the diaries that Calamity Jane left behind for her daughter. The most powerful of Nelson’s films, however, was the shortest and most straightforward. In Time Being (1991), Nelson records her dying mother in three static shots, beginning with a close-up of her aged face with her mouth agape, and gradually moving further away. Each shot ends with the camera shaking as Nelson averts her gaze, reminding us of the daughter filming her mother’s lifeless form. You could hear nothing but the projector whirring as the whole audience seemed to be holding its breath during this screening, and I left the cinema tearful, silent and humbled.

The other film to leave me in a state of stunned and tearful silence at the end was Lino Brocka’s Weighed But Found Wanting (1974), which the director described as his “first novel,” and which certainly possesses a novelistic richness in its depiction of these characters and their world. The film hits you in the gut from its opening scene, in which a woman is forced to undergo an abortion, and that’s far from the only act of cruelty we witness over the course of the next two hours, but while Brocka is pitiless in his depiction of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of this world, he also finds humanity and hope in its most wretched characters. Mario O'Hara and the astonishing Lolita Rodriguez play outcast characters who are mocked and reviled by the rich 'Christian' society, but Christopher de Leon – as the teenage son of a wealthy philanderer – is drawn to them and sees the goodness they possess, in sharp contrast to the world he grew up in. Once again, I am blown away by Brocka’s ability to immerse us completely in the world of his characters, and to make us care so deeply about their fates. He’s an incredible filmmaker, and I hope we see more restorations of his work as soon as possible.

There are highlights everywhere you look at Il Cinema Ritrovato. My festival programme ran the gamut from Henry King’s magnificent melodrama Tol’able David (1921) to Paula Delsol’s lost nouvelle vague gem La Dérive (1964); from the overwhelmingly beautiful Czech drama The Organist at St. Vitus’ Cathedral (1929) to the utterly insane puppet porn on display in Gerard Damiano’s Let My Puppets Come (1976). These are the discoveries that make Il Cinema Ritrovato a singularly joyous affair every year, although I confess the steadily growing temperature does threaten to make it feel like more of a chore at times. The air-conditioning in most of these cinemas is simply not up to the task, and with the summer heat only set to increase in the coming years, one wonders if the festival’s late June/early July positioning may need to be revised. It’s hard to fully enjoy a cinema experience when you emerge from the screening more saturated in sweat than you were going in.

The other challenge Il Cinema Ritrovato sets for us every year is more of a luxury problem – how do we decide between the multiple fascinating offerings positioned against each other in the programme? This is the inevitable conflict one faces in such a large and wide-ranging festival, but having said that, it did seem rather perverse on the part of the organisers to schedule the single screening of a rare 1930s Max Ophüls film and a rare 1920s Ernst Lubitsch film against each other. Having already seen Lubitsch’s So This is Paris (1926), I settled in for The Bartered Bride (1932) and made one of my most thrilling discoveries of the year. Curiously, it feels a little like Ophüls is directing a Lubitsch film here – this would have slotted in perfectly with his 1930s musicals – but Ophüls brings a sensational kinetic energy to his direction. Gorgeously crafted, witty, dynamic and full of hilarious gags, it’s a wondrous film that deserves to be much better known.

Those of us at the Ophüls screening had the added bonus of seeing this year’s Boarini Award to Mariann Lewinsky, who loves The Bartered Bride and selected it for this screening. Named after the founder of the Cineteca, the Vittorio Boarini are given to people who have distinguished themselves in the safeguarding and diffusion of cinema heritage, and in her last year as a co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato, Mariann Lewinsky was a worthy recipient. She established the Hundred Years Ago strand at the festival, which is now edging towards the sound era, and it was so touching to see her humbly accept this honour from her colleague Gianluca Farinelli. Lewinsky’s boundless enthusiasm and curiosity is emblematic of the spirit that has propelled Il Cinema Ritrovato through forty glorious years, and that spirit will keep it feeling vital for many more years to come.