June is the richest month. The most awaited two weeks in my annual festival pilgrimage. The route starts with Romania’s Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF), followed by Italy’s (and the world’s) most comprehensive festival for restored and archival film: Il Cinema Ritrovato. To shake up the traditional article on the two, I’ll start with the most recent impressions this time.
Il Cinema Ritrovato, in the city of Bologna, means “cinema rediscovered”, a most concise description. Not exhaustive though because Il Cinema Ritrovato is a marvel of curation and a highlight of the year for cinephiles. The proof is the steady and visible rise in attendees and a touchingly loyal base; many having returned for decades. Bologna is one of the most important places for restoring film material, with its specialised labs, and the festival highlights both its work and invites other centres to present theirs. A mix of earliest recorded images, archival finds and restorations, as well as more recent classics, it’s a true embarrassment of riches.
In other, more colloquial words: all killers, no fillers. There may be some boredom (a matter of personal taste and beliefs) but the advantages of a curated programme means overall quality (not a given with ‘standard’ festivals working with a more limited selection). I may not have been bothered with some movies projected in the town’ central square but when the same location hosted Bollywood classic Sholay (1975) in its glorious three-hour running time, I was consoled.
One of the homage sections was dedicated to Lewis Milestone (best known for war epics such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The current state of the world made me skip war-related content (I went for more escapist stuff, I admit) and so discovered he was also very good at film noir (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946). Hollywood legend and unconventional icon Katharine Hepburn was this edition’s star, and she needs no introduction. What a joy to see her in a movie I had never heard about, the fast and funny Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937). A completely different tone was set by the pre-war films of Japanese director Mikio Naruse, like the elegant melodrama The Road I Travel with You (1936). He is probably more famous for his post-war Floating Clouds (1955), ravishingly beautiful and just as sad. The eclectic selection also paid homage to Georges Simenon, the French author known mainly for his crime novels, many of them adapted. Like with Bertrand Tavernier’s The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul (1974), the film that surprised and touched me most this year, a wise, intriguing and compassionate drama.
Italian cinema is given ample place in Bologna. And so I discovered Luigi Comencini, who directed comedies and melodrama, telling immensely moving stories with a mischievous sense of humour and in exquisite images. Misunderstood/ Incompreso (1966), Eugenio/ Voltati Eugenio (1980), and Somewhere Beyond Love/ Delitto d’amore (1974) were the titles I caught and I hope to complete his filmography at the first chance.
What makes Il Cinema Ritrovato so beloved is the feeling of utopia. A town that re-opened a big cinema under the main square and uses the same place (this time above ground) for open-air screenings (in excellent technical conditions and carefully curated) for the summer months is an exception, especially in times where small theatres and multiplex chains alike have been closing.
TIFF, in Cluj-Napoca, also means the joy of meeting again. This is where the local film industry meets in largest numbers, and where it meets international guests. The Romanian Days have been busy as ever albeit with slightly fewer films and premieres. I assume a consequence of pandemic and post-pandemic production, or the general economic context. The screening of Radu Jude’s irreverent Kontinental ’25 was a hoot here, since it’s set in Cluj and is extremely critical about the town’s rapid gentrification. The film is also currently running in theatres. I also appreciated Igor Cobileanski’s Comatogen, an ingenious genre picture (always welcome!) that portraits one event from several perspectives. The drama is well written, with genuine surprises, and solidly acted. Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came/ Anul Nou care n-a fost continued its crowd-pleasing tour, while Teodora Ana Mihai’s Traffic/ Jaful secolului took a true story of a heist – spectacular in itself – and enriched it with a study of immigration and social inequity. To segue back to the first part of this article, the most interesting titles were once again the ones working with archives. The subject of Andra MacMasters’ Bright Future/ Viitor luminous is the most spectacular, a montage of material from a world student festival in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1989, where Romania sent a mixed delegation. The footage was shot by a member of an amateur film club and edited with skill, intelligence and playfulness. I am happy the doc was awarded Best Debut. Ana Lungu’s Merman/ Triton is also a montage of home movies, this time filmed between the 1940s and 1980s. It is hard to describe it in short, but I’ll try: Lungu weaves a hypnotic sequence of lives caught on camera and its most thrilling part is the large collection of footage from a professor of musicology documenting his family, loves, and travels. Lungu is aware of her interpretation and manipulation of images and is a remarkably self-reflective (film)maker and commentator of what she sees and creates. She discusses relations, sex, art, politics, the whole range of personal and collective destinies that make out decades of history. I hope the film will run in cinemas soon so I can dedicate an entire column to it because it is the most impressive Romanian films I have seen in years.
I also appreciated the international selection a lot. I could catch only one of Béla Tarr’s films, the less known The Outsider/ Szabadgyalog (1981) and it was beautiful in its freewheeling, generous look at a young man unsure of how to live “respectably”. The Estonian focus had two of the loveliest classics: Smile at Last/ Naerata ometi (Leida Laius & Arvo Iho, 1985) and A Woman Heats the Sauna/ Naine kütab sauna (Arvo Kruusement, 1979). A huge thank you to the selection team the included a sauna-set short film to introduce the latter, a well-needed (homo)erotic surprise at a morning screening. What a beautiful film Sauna Day (Anna Hints & Tushar Prakash, 2024) is. The current titles were no less entertaining, and here I mean anything by Rainer Sarnet, and especially The Invisible Fight/ Nähtamatu võitlus (2023). Featuring kung fu, music (mostly Black Sabbath), Orthodox monks, and set in Soviet-time Estonia, there’s nothing like it. Johan Dag Haugerud’s trilogy of relations, romance, and identity, titled matter-of-factly Sex, Love, Dreams, is a marvel of wit and tenderness. The latter is also currently in cinemas, do not miss it!
By Ioana Moldovan, columnist, ioana.moldovan@romania-insider.com
(Photo info & source: screening of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, by Margherita Caprilli // courtesy of Il Cinema Ritrovato/ Cineteca di Bologna)
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