On June 20, 2026, one of the world's most important film festivals opens in Bologna, Italy. Il Cinema Ritrovato will run through June 28, showing more than 500 films across eight different venues. This year is special—it's the festival's 40th anniversary—and the organizers are celebrating by honoring three film legends: director Luchino Visconti, actor Barbara Stanwyck, and performer Joséphine Baker.

If you've never heard of this festival, that's understandable. It's not like the big celebrity festivals you might know—the ones where filmmakers compete for prizes and red carpets fill with stars. Il Cinema Ritrovato is something different. It's a gathering where film archivists and historians from around the world come together to restore old films and show them to audiences. Think of it as a conference combined with a film festival.

What makes this festival special is that it's public, not just for industry experts. Some screenings happen outdoors in Piazza Maggiore, one of Bologna's ancient town squares. Thousands of ordinary people come to watch restored classics under the stars. At the same time, behind the scenes, archivists—the people who rescue old movies from decay—are solving complicated technical and creative problems about how these films should be shown and preserved.

The festival also runs a program for kids on June 23, so families can attend and young people get to experience cinema history too.

Earlier this year, the festival's organizers—a major film restoration center called the Cineteca di Bologna—brought a smaller selection of restored films to cities in the United States. They screened in Minneapolis in February and in Silver Spring, Maryland in March. This helped build an audience beyond Europe before the big festival in June.

The three filmmakers being honored this year represent very different worlds. Visconti made grand, theatrical films as well as gritty films about everyday life. Stanwyck was one of Hollywood's finest actors, working across many different types of films. Baker danced at the Folies Bergère in Paris, worked in the French Resistance during World War II, and became an important voice for civil rights in America. Their stories don't fit neatly into single categories—and that's exactly why the festival chose them.

After 40 years, Il Cinema Ritrovato has shaped how the world thinks about and preserves old films. Archivists and curators who run major film institutions today learned their craft partly by attending this festival. Film preservation used to be a quiet, technical job nobody paid attention to. Now it's recognized as important cultural work—the kind of work that countries and cities take seriously, much like supporting museums or theaters. Bologna has been at the center of that shift for four decades.