Cinema Rediscovered Highlights Revealed

Cinema Rediscovered, Bristol’s festival of classic cinema, returns for its seventh annual feast of restorations and resdiscoveries in July with a packed programme of more than 50 events spanned across multiple venues. The detailed programme won’t be available until later this month, but full festival passes are now on sale and highlights have been revealed.

This year’s festival features UK premieres of 15 new restorations. The most high profile of these are Sofia Coppola’s extraordinarily accomplished, erotically charged black comedy The Virgin Suicides, prior to its 4K theatrical re-release on July 28, and the great Stanley Kubrick’s low budget 1953 debut Fear and Desire.

Long before he achieved renown as a geriatric impregnator, Al Pacino was one of the most exciting young actors in Hollywood. One of his key early roles was in Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), based on the true story of a whistleblowing New York cop. A newly remastered 50th anniversary 4K edition of the film forms the centrepiece of the festival’s Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance & The Blacklist strand, which also includes a selection of great politically engaged films by those who’d been blacklisted decades earlier in the Communist witch-hunts orchestrated by the US Senate’s Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). These include M*A*S*H, Claudine, Midnight Cowboy and Shampoo.

Kamikaze Hearts. Image: BFI/Kino Lorber

The Down & Dirty: American strand showcases a selection of DIY lo-fi flicks from across the pond, including Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), Beth B’s Salvation (1987), Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1986) and Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998).

The 100th anniversary of invention of 16mm is celebrated in the Film on Film strand, which includes new 35mm prints of  Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) and Shirley Clarke’s The Portrait of Jason (1967). There’s also a presentation on the once hugely popular but now obsolete 9.5mm format and the premiere of a new short film by Mark Jenkin, BAFTA award-winning director of Bait and Enys Men.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Image: Cinematek

The unifying theme for Cinema Rediscovered 2023 is Other Ways of Seeing. This is inspired by the surprise victory of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) in the latest BFI/ Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. This prompts a discussion about the ever-increasing influence of film lists on public tastes and box office results.

Cinema Rediscovered runs from July 16-30. Festival passes are on sale at £100 each (£80 concessions; £60 age 24 and under). Tickets for individual events go on sale on Thursday 15 June when the full programme will be published here. For further information, sign up for the free Cinema Rediscovered e-newsletter.