Cinema Reborn – giving new life to old films
Image: THE LAST EMPEROR. film still
The fifth incarnation of the Cinema Reborn Film Festival is being held at Randwick Ritz, with a mouth-watering program of retro classics for true cinephiles.
The annual festival is the passion project of a collective of cinema enthusiasts, programmers, filmmakers, screen historians and critics. They are dedicated to finding films that have been given new life through faithful restoration, and showing them as truly as they can in the way the filmmaker intended.
Scouring archives around the world, the Cinema Reborn team have discovered treasures dating back to the crinkly early black and white days of a fledgling art form, through to more recent classics. Many of the films were ground-breaking at the time (and even now) for their content and style; some were even banned.
Apart from their own narrative, the films tell a collective story of the development of the industry across time. In each of the programs from the five festivals from 2018 to this year, the selection of films are evidence of the zeitgeist at their time of making. They show the development of techniques and technology and how that informed filmmaking.
They also show the shifting power of women with more female directors and female-led storytelling.
This year’s selection includes films from Senegal, Italy, France, Australia, South Korea, Germany, UK, USA.
Genres range across madcap comedy, historical epic, suspense, drama, romance.
Among the highlights is the opening night film, Shoeshine/ Sciusciá, 1946, Italy, directed by Vittorio de Sica. It is a heart-warming story about two young boys in post-war Rome, trying to earn money by shining the shoes of American soldiers.
Another highlight is the beautiful restored, mutli-Oscar winning 1987 epic, The Last Emperor directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Also on the program is the charming German musical comedy, I By Day You By Night/Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht. Made in 1932, at the brink of Nazi domination of Germany, the film barely saw release before it had to be hidden away due to the number of Jewish cast and crew who worked on it. It took almost nine decades before the film saw light again.
Ieoh Island (1977) is a South Korean film that pushed boundaries and conventions. A thriller with sexual undercurrent, environmental message, and a very strong feminist theme.
