An exploration of feminist cinema and archival films at a film festival, highlighting a retrospective on groundbreaking works and the call to smash the patriarchy.
Cinema Ritrovato is a nine-day festival at the Cineteca di Bologna that celebrates new restorations of widely unseen archival cinema. Maggie Hennefeld recounts her experience as a spectator and participant in the June 2025 edition, where she filled her festival docket with unruly visions of feminist and women-made cinema. Her viewings included French comedies by Coline Serreau, anti-colonial films by Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon) and Sumitra Peries (Sri Lanka), silent-era melodramas accompanied by live music, sizzling Nordic noirs, and Katharine Hepburn’s feminist acrobatics featured in a retrospective curated by Molly Haskell. Hennefeld concludes with a reflection about how Serreau’s rousing call to “smash the patriarchy” uncannily echoed her own participation in a panel that followed a screening of Karen Pearlman’s archival film Breaking Plates (2024), in which “cinema’s first nasty women” come back to life to galvanize a feminist revolution.
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