Away, far away from the festival bustle of the fall season, in a small Italian town, there is an event dedicated to silent film called Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the largest of its kind in Europe. For the second time in the year, Italy becomes the assembly point of film archivists, restorers, researchers, and historians – but, in contrast to the more popular Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, the one in Pordenone plays to a different rule, even if only for the fact that there are no parallel screenings, which means that everyone – around 1000 people – sees the same film, at once, and listens to the same live soundtrack, that is never electronic. And Jay Weissberg, the festival’s artistic director since 2015, knows his audience well; not always in-person, although many have confessed to me that they’ve been faithful to the Giornate for entire decades, but rather professionally – and so, the festival retains a certain self-conscience, one that is both cinephile and commercial in nature (because, after all, archives have their own market).

Călin Boto

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Film curator, writer and editor, member of the selection committees of BIEFF and Woche der Kritik, FIPRESCI member and alumnus of the film criticism workshops organized by the Sarajevo, Warsaw and Locarno film festivals. Teaches a course on film criticism and analysis at UNATC. He has curated programs for Cinemateca Română, Short Waves, V-F-X Ljubljana, Trieste Film Festival, as well as the Bucharest retrospective of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour in 2024 and 2025.

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