‘Cinema Ritrovato on Tour’ returns to Brown, showcases restored film classics

This week, the annual Cinema Ritrovato on Tour — a European film festival focused on film restoration and preservation — returned to Brown for its 12th edition. This year’s festival brings a selection of restored classic films to College Hill, allowing audiences to delve into historical themes like migration and revolution. 

Hosted in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts from March 12 to 15, the festival is a collaboration between Brown’s Department of Italian Studies and the Cineteca di Bologna, an archive for film restoration and preservation. The original Cinema Ritrovato Festival takes place in Bologna, Italy every summer, displaying restored films from around the world.

This year’s touring festival features a tribute to late actors Marcello Mastroianni and Donald Sutherland, alongside a lineup of historical films from across Europe. 

“Brown was the first to actually (host) a Cinema Ritrovato on tour. So we are the original,” said Massimo Riva, professor and interim chair of Italian studies at Brown. Riva is one of the festival’s curators.

The “Cinema Ritrovato on Tour” festival began at Brown in 2014. Since then, the touring festival has grown and is now hosted in venues across the country, from Washington, D.C. to Minnesota.

“Preservation is really the core of what we do as human beings, in a sense, because we live through a time of radical transformation,” Riva said. 

The festival opened on Wednesday with a showing of “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” a film directed by Sergej Paradžanov. Though Paradžanov was Armenian, the film takes place in 19th-century Ukraine, following a tragic love story between two young Ukrainian Hutsuls, members of a Ukrainian ethnic subgroup. 

For Riva, the film is “epic, psychological and sentimental,” he said. “It’s really fascinating, diving into that ancestral memory.”

Montagu James GS, a PhD candidate in history who focuses on 20th century political and cultural history, said the film showcases “regional and historical cultures of Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, that are not well known to American audiences,” he added. 

James also praised the film’s original style, noting that “the restoration also enabled the film’s breathtaking cinematography and use of magical realism and symbolism to really shine.”

Such independent, non-traditional films “challenge our aesthetic perception and, in doing so, tell a story uniquely,” Oleksii Shebanov ’26 said in an interview with The Herald following the film screening. 

Shebanov said that as a Ukrainian, the film was “overwhelming to watch.”

“I felt the action and imagery as if they were unfolding in the room,” he added.

“Il Cammino della Speranza,” or “Path of Hope,” directed by Pietro Germi, is next in the lineup. The 1950 film, which was shown Thursday night, centers on migration and displacement in postwar Italy. 

On Friday night, a screening of the Hungarian film “The Round-Up” — directed by Miklós Jancsó — will be followed by a conversation organized by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities’s Film-Thinking series. The film depicts political repression in the 1860s, but alludes to Soviet occupation around the time of the film’s release in the mid-1900s, Riva said.

Closing the festival in homage to Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni is “La Nuit de Varennes,” a 1982 historical drama set during the French Revolution and starring Mastroianni. 2024 marked the 100th anniversary of Mastrioanni’s birth.

The film, with its themes of revolution and transitions of power, “speaks to the things that we are going through right now,” Riva said.

For Riva, this festival is the Italian studies department’s contribution to the preservation of the past. “The past speaks to the present (and) the future and so we need to watch again these classic films, these rare films, to keep alive our awareness, and also our sensibility, our imagination,” Riva said.

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