Make Mine Columbia

As is often the case, the retrospective was one of the highlights of the Locarno Film Festival

(Apologies for the hiatus, Locarno kept me quite busy)

Ever since I started attending the Locarno Film Festival in 2006, I’ve always been particularly drawn to its retrospectives, not least because Locarno is one of the few major events to still do them on a large scale (compared to, say, Cannes and Venice, which have replaced them with a selection of new restorations under the Classics label). And while my viewing habits have changed a bit in the last ten years, as a result of actually working for the festival, the retrospective remains what I mainly seek out when I see the Locarno program on the big screen.

This year was no exception, with a 44-film series devoted to the centenary of Columbia Pictures. The program – and its excellent accompanying book - was curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, one of the most acclaimed names in the field (among other things, he’s one of the four directors of the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna), and the approach was impeccable: having full access to the Sony Pictures archive, with only a handful of titles unavailable due to print condition, Ehsan put together a selection that was recognizable and surprising at the same time.