Please note: This event took place in
Cinema Rediscovered launched its first edition in July 2016, taking inspiration from the pioneering Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, and giving our approach a Bristol twist. Both festivals celebrate big birthdays this year, with Il Cinema Ritrovato turning forty and Cinema Rediscovered turning ten.
To celebrate, we are delighted to welcome Il Cinema Ritrovato’s Co-director Ehsan Khoshbakht, also an author, filmmaker and one of the world’s leading rep curators, for a conversation with our founder Mark Cosgrove hosted by film critic, historian and long-standing collaborator Pamela Hutchinson.
It will be an opportunity to get insights into Ehsan’s illustrious career as a film curator for key international festivals such as Il Cinema Ritrovato and Locarno and institutions the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cinémathèque française and BFI Southbank; as well as his wider creative practice. Mark and Ehsan will also reflect on how our respective festivals and the wider repertory film exhibition scene have evolved over the past decade.
Ehsan Khoshbakht co-directs Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival of film history and film restoration in Bologna. Since 2024, he has curated the retrospective section of the Locarno Film Festival. His programmes have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Harvard Film Archive, the Academy Museum, BFI Southbank, the Cinémathèque française, the Danish Film Institute, Filmoteca Española, and Cinemateca Portuguesa, among many other venues and festivals around the world. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on cinema, including Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist (forthcoming, 2026), Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945–1960 (2025), Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959 (2024), and In the Cities of Cinema: Conversations with Jonathan Rosenbaum (2025). Ehsan is also a filmmaker and his last work, Celluloid Underground, was premiered in 2023.
