Archivio Aperto is the festival dedicated to the rediscovery of small-format film heritage — private, amateur, experimental, artist’s cinema — and their contemporary reuse organised by Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia.
Founded in Bologna in 2008 as an opening day of the archive, over the years it has developed into a festival, with focuses and retrospectives dedicated to the greatest names in amateur cinema, home movies and found footage, from Ross McElwee to Gustav Deutsch, up to Jonas Mekas, Boris Lehman, David Perlov, Maya Deren and Péter Forgács.
Its 18th edition, called Time of Liberations will take place in Bologna September 26 - 30.
This year there will be a focus on filmmaker Rose Lowder, a retrospective of Kenneth Anger's films, an homage to Andrea Granchi’ art films, a curatorial programme by Cinédoc Paris Films Coop on French experimental cinema and a tribute to Marinella Pirelli.
What if acts of liberation were a small breach in the timeline? The kind that allows us to make that dialectical leap Walter Benjamin spoke of, and encounter the past within our present? And what if liberations were always a conquest of the self—when the self, however, is the result of an active relationship with other bodies, human, animal, and vegetal? What if liberations included those from Nazi-Fascist or imperialist occupations, but also from authoritarian regimes, patriarchal and colonial cages, and from economic and social injustices?
What if liberation also meant freeing cinema from the often stifling mechanisms of the industry? And what if we could then celebrate a poorer but freer cinema, as taught to us by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, or Roberto Rossellini who, eighty years ago, created the film that became the emblem of all liberations, Roma, città aperta, shooting in the rubble-strewn streets of a shattered city, even using expired film stock? “Spring will come. And it will be more beautiful than the others. Because we will be free.”
Full program here: https://www.archivioaperto.it/en/editions/time-of-liberations/
