Last month, 3,000 cinephiles congregated at dusk in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy 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.
It’s all part of the the feminist programming at Il Cinema Ritrovato. The annual archival film festival spotlights long unseen, unjustly forgotten but urgently timely works from the celluloid archive and unleashed them onto the volatile, open-ended present. The Ritrovato is nothing less than a celebration of the capacity to create community around films that you quite literally could not see anywhere else—long obliterated from the archive due to a combination of material decay, political censorship and ideological incomprehension. I was especially struck this year by the feminist themes that emerged.