Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021: Favourites & Revelations

Miguel Marías (Spain)

Absolute favourite: Körkarlen (Victor Sjöström)

Major discovery: Die Rebellion (Wolfgang Staudte)

Curiously, the film that this year impressed me most at Bologna and a film older by more than a century, which probably I had already watched some ten or eleven times before, and which to top my own surprise, was not presented in a new restoration, but one dated in 2003; I’m talking of Sjöström’s Körkarlen, which this time seemed to me greater than ever. As for major discovery, it would be some of the Wolfgang Staudte films I had not seen before Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021. Both Die Rebellion (and also Kirmes, which I could not catch at Bologna but caught here on the net). I had planned to watch two films which for diverse reasons, as they do sometimes, escaped me twice (both of them): the documentary about John Farrow Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows and the very intriguing The Swamp, by Colin Campbell, which is a very interesting and little known filmmaker.

Körkarlen