Revival festivals like Il Cinema Ritrovato drive home the importance of funding for and preservation of the arts. Long live feminist cinema rediscovered!

PUBLISHED 7/21/2024
by MAGGIE HENNEFELD, Ms. Magazine

Three thousand cinephiles congregated at dusk in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy, on June 27 for an outdoor cine-concert of The Wind (1928)—a silent film about desperate love in bad weather—with the message “FREE ABORTION” projected on a church at the side of the square. The people hummed in euphoric anticipation. But they were not alone. Lesbian vampires, cross-dressing gun slingers, communist sex workers, feminist cinematographers and a woman whose bad date literally turns out to be Satan—these hell-raising dissidents all had pride of place in the feminist programming at Il Cinema Ritrovato.

The annual archival film festival draws thousands of spectators from all over the world to Bologna every June. The Ritrovato’s rallying cry is to spotlight long unseen, unjustly forgotten but urgently timely works from the celluloid archive and unleash them onto the volatile, open-ended present. A pride parade, reproductive rights activism and pro-Palestine student protests intersected with a nine-day festival whose programming ranged from Japanese costume dramas and Napoléon biopics to Algerian feminist essay films, 16mm queer body poems, and “second wave exploitation” comedies about utopian-socialist polygamy.

Continued; https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/21/feminist-film-history-bologna-italy-il-cinema-ritrovato/