People usually stop me on the street to talk about Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. I receive letters, messages, articles, and invitations to attend screenings. Students focus on the film for their essays and dissertations. I constantly hear expressions of affection out of respect for this film, which was only released for an altogether short time. That fever you experience when a film begins its life in theaters has not yet subsided. The wonderful adventure to Hollywood to receive the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the award at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, all the other awards received and the international festivals at which the film was presented, are beautiful sensations I feel I have freshly experienced. The year-long promotion done around the world is a journey from which I have just returned, the suitcases yet to be unpacked. In short, they are all emotions of today that only the future will turn into memories. And yet I find myself called suddenly by my friends at Istituto Luce Cinecittà, L’Immagine Ritrovata, Cineteca di Bologna and Dolce & Gabbana to tell me that they have decided to restore Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. What happens? The figures don’t add up. For goodness sake, thank you all for your attention, commitment, and wonderful initiative. But if the film has just been released, why restore it? I'm really surprised and bewildered, as if I’m in a dream or a special effect. Yet I must note that 25 years have passed ... Twenty-five? What a joke. It is absolutely impossible. I suppose it is a calculation error. It is a film present constantly in my daily life. Journalists never cease to question me about the reasons and the contours of this adventurous experience. In whatever country an audience attends, I always feel a throbbing emotion, so for me it is completely unnatural to believe that all those seasons have passed. It seems to me to be an arithmetic error, a passage of time not well recorded, or at least hazardously so. Furthermore, the memory of working on the movie is fresh in my mind as if I had made it only a few months ago. So many friends and collaborators shared this adventure with me, and we speak of it whenever we meet, although many have abandoned us in the meantime. I also happen to return periodically to the places where I imagined and realized the film, because it is not uncommon that someone comes to shoot interviews or documentaries about Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, and they ask me for news, testimonials, and information. I experience it, therefore, as a work that essentially has never ended. So to find myself today sitting in a digital console in a room that is not entirely dark, reviewing the rolls of film and realizing from the wrinkles on the images and the wounds of the sound that so much time has actually passed, throws me into a dimension that is truly disconcerting. Yes, there is no other explanation; it must be just a special effect.

Giuseppe Tornatore

Born in Bagheria, Palermo. After many years dedicated to theater, photography and the production of numerous documentaries, he debuted at just twenty nine as a film director with the movie “The Professor,” for which he also wrote the screenplay along with Massimo De Rita. It is in 1989, however, that he was thrust to international attention with “Cinema Paradiso,” written and directed by him, which won the Oscar for best foreign film. Tornatore’s films have been regularly distributed worldwide since then, garnering awards and success. Among the best known actors appearing in his films are: Ben Gazzara, Jacques Perrin, Marcello Mastroianni, Michèle Morgan, Sergio Castellitto, Laura Del Sol, Philippe Noiret, Tim Roth, Gerard Depardieau, Roman Polanski, Monica Bellucci, Michele Placido and Geoffrey Rush.