Seven restored Australian movies will get their premiere at this year’s Cinema Reborn festival of retrospective film, organisers have revealed.
With its biggest line-up yet, Australia’s only festival of restored classics will present a week-long program of international restorations, curated for lovers of screen history.
Film critic and member of the organising committee Grace Boschetti said seeing films on the big screen was making a comeback and Cinema Reborn celebrated the communal experience of cinema-going, inviting viewers to slow down and fully engage with a film in its intended setting.
“A lot of cinemas were extremely hard hit through COVID,” she told Central News. “We’re just trying to contribute to the film culture in Australia in a small way.
“My belief is that the experience of seeing a film in a cinema just can’t be replicated at home. Now more than ever, seeing a film in a cinema is sacred and really special.”
Geoff Gardner, the founding member of Cinema Reborn, agreed.
“There’s nothing equal to a really good 4K restoration,” he said.
Established in 2018, the Cinema Reborn Film Festival offers Australian audiences a unique opportunity to experience classics on the big screen, bringing together some of the best new restorations from the last couple of years to Australia.
We try to have a program that spans decades. We want something from the 1920s, the 1930s, the ’40s, ’50s and so on.
It will include seven Australian world premiere restorations, among them a double feature of Anna Kannava’s Ten Years After… Ten Years Older (1986) and The Butler (1997), as well as John Hughes’ What I Have Written (1996), which will be introduced by Hughes himself.
This year’s program also features films from Ukraine, France, Lebanon, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Spain, and more.
“We try to have a program that spans decades,” said Boschetti. “We want something from the 1920s, the 1930s, the ’40s, ’50s and so on.
“We also think about geographical diversity; we want films from all over the world.”
The festival will open with a 4K restoration of George Cukor’s Holiday (1938), an offbeat romantic comedy classic starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably (1977) is among the most provocative films in the program. Set in post-1968 Paris, it follows a disillusioned young man drifting through radical politics, environmental despair, and spiritual emptiness, ultimately confronting the question of whether there is any place left for hope.
Other must-see films at Cinema Reborn include Orson Welles’ film noir Touch of Evil (1958), Robert Altman’s revisionist western McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting final film, The Sacrifice (1986).
Gardner calls the festival’s closing night film, The Fall of Otrar (1991), a “knockout”. It is the story of Genghis Khan’s destruction of the lost civilisation of Otrar, told by Kazakhstani filmmaker Ardak Amirkulov.
Members of the Cinema Reborn organising committee in Bologna. (Left to right) Geoff Gardner, Simon Taaffe, and James Vaughan. (Image supplied by Geoff Gardner)
“Until I started Cinema Reborn, I regarded myself as retired, but in my retirement I started going to a festival in Bologna called Il Cinema Ritrovato,” Gardner said.
“I loved that event, and some years ago I wrote a lot of letters to people saying we should do an event that’s like it.
“After we’ve been there, we start thinking about the films we’ve just seen and our event the following year. The trick is to make sure it’s something that still hasn’t been seen.”
Il Cinema Ritrovato shows over 400 newly restored films every June to thousands of viewers, many of whom come from outside of Italy.
Cinema Reborn is volunteer-run and driven by a passionate team of cinephiles.
“We have a group of filmmakers, critics, journalists, with a preponderance now of younger people who are just as enthusiastic as we were when we got going,” Gardner said.
“Most of the people who started were older professionals, but since then, the balance has tilted.”
Grace adds: “We really want to get as many young people in the cinema as possible. We just launched a Letterboxd account, and we have a program that’s going to appeal to a huge demographic of people.”
At a time when computer and TV-based digital content and streaming platforms dominate, Cinema Reborn reminds viewers of the enduring power of film as both an art form and a historical record.
Cinema Reborn runs in Sydney from April 30 to May 6 at Ritz cinemas. Randwick, and at Melbourne’s Lido cinemas from May 8-13.
Student tickets are priced at $15. See here for the full program.
Main image from What I Have Written supplied.
