Cinema Rediscovered 2023
Please note: This event finished in July 2023
Cinema Rediscovered – the UK’s leading festival of classic cinema and film restorations – returns to venues in and around Bristol UNESCO City of Film for its 7th annual edition featuring big screen experiences of brand-new film restorations, rediscoveries and film on film rarities from around the world, alongside a multitude of starting points for lively conversation. You can expect a friendly space for all to share passions and enthusiasms for film.
Screening at cinemas including 20th Century Flicks, Clevedon’s Curzon Cinema & Arts, Watershed, and new this year, Bristol Aquarium, which holds the former IMAX cinema, plus pop-ups in the crypt of St John on the Wall and The Galleries Car Park.The festival will launch a UK wide tour of highlights (Aug – Oct 2023), and an online offer via MUBI, the global streaming service, production company and film distributor.
We recommend you book early to avoid disappointment.
Download Schedule as PDF (920KB)
Cinema Rediscovered is a Watershed production. Its principal funders and sponsors are BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, MUBI and Park Circus.
Cinema Rediscovered 2023 programme
Browse strands:
Previous Screenings & Events in this programme
Reframing Film Sessions
Reframing Film
Explore alternative ways of connecting older films with a new wave of cinema goers & get inspired to broaden repertory cinema beyond the mainstream.
Opening event: Other Ways of Seeing
Reframing Film
The 7th edition of Cinema Rediscovered opens with a discussion inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which seized the top spot in Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time poll this year.
UK Premiere: Fear & Desire
classified 12 Restored & Rediscovered
A new 4K restoration of the original 1953 cinema release print of Kubrick’s debut feature film which he subsequently cut following negative audience response.
UK Premiere: The Virgin Suicides
classified 15 Restored & Rediscovered
Sofia Coppola’s debut feature is a melancholic, dreamy vision that marked her out as a distinctive new voice in cinema.
Film on Film: A Dog Called Discord + Meshes of The Afternoon
classified 12A Reframing Film
Join Tara Judah for a very special double-bill on film, starting with BAFTA-winning director Mark Jenkin's A Dog Called Discord commissioned by the BFI to mark their recent Film on Film Festival.
Lunchtime Talk: Sight & Sound
Reframing Film
Whether you’re a film lover or are aspiring to work in film writing/criticism, this session will give you insights into Sight & Sound, home to a once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll.
A look at the increasingly ubiquitous role of lists in shaping and navigating the past present and future of film culture.
Uptight
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
Following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Cleveland’s black community is on a knife-edge, wondering who, if anyone, can be trusted.
UK Premiere: Brief Encounters
classified 15 S Restored & Rediscovered
Muratova’s debut solo feature is an impressionistic dissection of a love triangle in freefall, which was banned by Soviet censors for twenty years until the advent of perestroika.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
classified 18 Reframing Film
Chantal Akerman’s slow-burning masterpiece was voted as the Greatest Film of All Time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.
Look who’s back: The Hollywood Renaissance & the Blacklist
Look Who’s Back
Join season curator Andy Willis for a talk that invites you to re-think the contribution of Hollywood’s blacklistees to American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s.
UK Premiere: The Long Farewell
classified 15 S Restored & Rediscovered
A radical, elliptical tale of a mother-and-son drifitng apart, Muratova’s underseen classic is a refreshingly challenging cinematic work.
Unlikeable Female Characters: The Last Seduction
classified 18 Reframing Film
Spinning a web of intrigue around her male victims, this erotic thriller is centred around one of the all-time great femme fatales!
Tell Them Willie Boy is Here
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
In this classic late 1960s liberal western from Abraham Polonsky, Robert Redford leads a posse in pursuit of a native American on the run in the early part of the 20th century.
UK Premiere: Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive
classified 18 S Restored & Rediscovered
Newly restored, Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive is a stylistically daring and vibrant pulp trip through 1990s Hong Kong.
Film, the Living Record of Our Memory
classified 12A S Reframing Film
A journey behind the curtain of film preservation, and the painstaking work that ensures film stays alive for modern audiences.
World Premiere: Together With Lorenza Mazzetti
classified 12A Restored & Rediscovered
Based on interviews with Mazzetti shortly before her death in 2020, this documentary reclaims her position as a key artist of post-war Europe.
Lunchtime Talk: 100 Years of 16mm
Reframing Film
Join a discussion with filmmakers and artists who use and work with the medium of 16mm fiilm.
Drylongso
classified 15 Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored
This rediscovered gem of American DIY filmmaking is an elegiac tribute to Black female originality.
World Premiere: Together
classified 12A Restored & Rediscovered
A pair of Deaf dock workers struggle to make ends meet in London’s East End in Lorenza Mazzetti’s lyrical centrepiece of Free Cinema.
Deaf Conversations About Cinema: Together
Restored & Rediscovered
Join us at the 13:35 screening of Together on Fri 28 July which will feature BSL interpreters to describe any sounds or dialogue that form part of the film. After the screening please joins us, from 14:30, for a post-screening discussion in the Café & Bar. The discussion will be hosted by Deaf artist, performer and filmmaker David Ellington and will feature BSL interpretation throughout.
The Passionate Stranger with Carol Morley
classified PG Restored & Rediscovered
Black and white collides with Technicolor fantasy in Muriel Box’s romantic comedy, poking fun at the wish fulfilment behind cinematic romances.
Portrait of Jason
classified 15 Reframing Film
Hustler and singer Jason Holliday regales us over a long night of the soul in this iconic LGBTQ+ documentary.
UK Premiere: Variety
classified 18 Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored
Female voyeurism and desire collide together in the centre of a seedy early ‘80s New York.
UK Premiere: Twilight (Szürkület)
classified 15 Restored & Rediscovered
Highly praised but little seen, this stark murder mystery rips the police procedural film apart.
Branded to Kill
classified 18 S Restored & Rediscovered
On the director’s centenary year, rediscover this wild and trippy blast of Japanese genre cinema!
Wanda
classified 15 Reframing Film
Barbara Loden’s only feature film is a masterpiece of hardscrabble, independent Americana.
16mm with Nachleben Film Lab & Archive
Reframing Film
A screening of shorts projected on 16mm in the Café & Bar, closing with a rare screening of Michael Snow’s experimental film Wavelength (courtesy of LUX Moving Image).
Cinema Walk 1
Bristol UNESCO City Of Film
Join local enthusiast and historian Mark Fuller for the first of two different, gentle, walks that between them take in the landmarks and personalities of cinema in central Bristol from the 1880s to the present day.
Shampoo
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
Sex, hair salons and state affairs all collide in this classic farce starring Warren Beatty and the formerly blacklisted Lee Grant as Felicia Karpf.
UK Premiere: The Moon Is a Green Cheese
classified PG S Cinékids
A naturalist fantasy in kaleidoscopic colours, as a family holidays in the Stockholm archipelago.
Lunchtime Talk: Small is Beautiful: 9.5mm
Reframing Film
Join BFI National Film Archive Curatorial Archivist Rosie Taylor to see films screened on a 9.5mm projector and learn more about its prolific and fascinating history.
Brick & Mirror
classified 18 S Restored & Rediscovered
A Teherani taxi driver finds an abandoned baby in the back seat of his cab, journeying through the city in a vain attempt to find the infant’s mother.
Claudine
classified 15 Look Who’s Back
In an Oscar®-nominated performance, Diahann Carroll plays a black working class mother struggling to make ends meet, offering an antidote to the testosterone driven star-turns of the blaxploitation cycle.
Salomé
classified 12A Restored & Rediscovered
Forgotten at the time, this extravagant production of Salomé is now one of the great feminist films.
The great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer gives a surreal spin on Lewis Carroll's classic story with this truly absurd tale which mixes animation and live action to brilliant effect.
M*A*S*H
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
The film that helped director Robert Altman break through into the mainstream, M*A*S*H captures the meeting of the free-wheeling sentiments of the 1960s counter-culture with the cynicism that would emerge within American society in the 1970s.
Eve’s Bayou
classified 15 Restored & Rediscovered
Drawing on Creole folklore, and the stories that arose out of her childhood, Kasi Lemmons’s debut is a bewitching Southern Gothic tale.
UK Premiere: Millennium Mambo
classified 15 PS Restored & Rediscovered
A hazy, neon-splattered descent through modern Taipei at night-time, thrumming with techno, alcohol and ennui.
Summer of Soul: Expanded Screening & Afterparty
classified 12A Bristol UNESCO City Of Film
Party like it’s 1969! An expanded screening of Sundance award-winner Summer of Soul, followed by an underground funk & soul party in The Galleries Car Park Basement in Broadmead.
UK Premiere: Salvation!
classified 15 Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored
The devoutly anarchic comic satire on religion, greed and consumerism in 1980s America.
The Devil Queen (A Rainha Diaba)
classified 18 S Restored & Rediscovered
A cult classic of Brazilian Queer cinema, this outrageously funky and stylish crime film infuriated the Brazilian military dictatorship at the time.
Midnight Cowboy
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman hustle their way through 1960s New York in this bittersweet classic of New Hollywood which remains the only X-rated film to be awarded the Oscar® for Best Picture.
Cinema Walk 2
Bristol UNESCO City Of Film
Join local enthusiast and historian Mark Fuller for the second of two gentle, walks that between them take in the landmarks and personalities of cinema in central Bristol from the 1880s to the present day.
UK Premiere: The Mother and the Whore
classified 18 S Restored & Rediscovered
A searing, compassionate three-and-a-half-hour exploration of relationships in the May ’68 sexual revolution's aftermath.
100 Years of 16mm
Bristol UNESCO City Of Film
Lovers of analogue, immerse yourself in the sensory splendour of 16mm, in its centenary year! Enjoy free workshops in splicing, dicing and projecting, alongside live performances from Surgeons Girl.
Yield to the Night
classified 15 Bristol UNESCO City Of Film
Lee Thompson’s gripping capital punishment drama Yield to the Night from 1956 is a Brit noir classic and a unique career achievement for Diana Dors as Mary Hilton, a woman awaiting execution for murder.
Eisenstein, Mexico... and Garbo
classified 18 Reframing Film
Join Professor Ian Christie for this special screening of A Trip to Tetlapayac in search of Eisenstein in Mexico, plus the UK Premiere of Mark Rappaport's The Marriage of Greta Garbo and Sergei Eisenstein.
UK Premiere: Serpico
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
Remembered for Al Pacino’s dynamic central performance as an NYPD cop resisting the corruption all around him, Serpico is a classic film of the paranoid 1970s, one that offers a detailed depiction of a system gone bad.
Undercurrent (Yoru No Kawa)
classified 15 S Restored & Rediscovered
A kimono designer in 1950s Kyoto is caught between two worlds in this riveting melodrama.
Aftersun + A Portrait of Ga
classified 12A Reframing Film
An instant classic from its premiere onwards, Charlotte Wells’ debut feature marks her as a thrilling new voice in cinema.
Morvern Callar
classified 15 Reframing Film
Lynne Ramsay’s second feature is a mesmerising journey into a 21st century existential crisis shown here on a brand new 35mm BFI print.
One Hand Don’t Clap
classified 12A Restored & Rediscovered
Calypso music is celebrated in all its beauty in this restored documentary featuring legends such as Calypso Rose and Lord Kitchener.
Kamikaze Hearts
classified 18 Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored
Juliet Bashore’s queer docufiction stars Tigr Mennett and real-life porn star girlfriend Sharon Mitchell celebrates the heady days of the San Francisco underground in the 1980s.
Curzon Cinema & Arts Open Doors and Serpico
classified 18 Look Who’s Back
Take a trip out to one of the oldest running cinema venues in the country and experience Sidney Lumet’s take on the true story of New York policeman Frank Serpico in a brand new 4K restoration for its 50th anniversary.
UK Premiere: Bushman
classified 12A Restored & Rediscovered
A radical view of the cultural and social upheavals of the late 1960s America from an African perspective.
MUBI Presents: Cinema Rediscovered Film Quiz
Reframing Film
Wind down and rediscover the movie trivia hidden in the recesses of your brain.
Explore Cinema Rediscovered 2023
Guest writer Harriet Taylor from SWITCH offers a fresh take on Juliet Bashore's quasi-documentary Kamikaze Hearts, screening at Cinema Rediscovered 2023 on Thu 27 July and Sun 30 July.
20th Century Flicks' Daisy Steinhardt takes us through Lynne Ramsay’s Movern Callar (2002), which is being screened from a new BFI 35mm print as part of Cinema Rediscovered 2023.
Guest writer Sean Wilson explores some of the soundtrack highlights & musical motifs of this year's Cinema Rediscovered programme.
Andy Willis (Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator at HOME in Manchester), curator of the Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist strand at this year's Cinema Rediscovered festival, dives into the thinking behind the strand and the political context of this era of Hollywood filmmaking.
