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

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. 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. …