Considering Venice’s dwindling reputation, Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato may well soon become Italy’s flagship film festival, if it hasn’t yet already.

Now in its 48th edition, the International Film Festival Rotterdam has become something of an overwhelming experience, with hundreds of titles being shown over the week and a half that it takes place.

Never intended to be a mere celebration of movies from the past, the 32nd edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna dispensed with any residual rhetoric about the supposed glory of what cinema used to be in favor of engaging with the present.

As inexorable as the executioner’s axe comes the 50th anniversary of ’68, the most innocuous of “revolutionary” commemorations, which Cinéma du Réel wisely decided to celebrate against the grain.

Unlike consumer democracies, authoritarian states do not afford their citizens the illusion of freedom. Everything occurring under their tutelage reflect, to varying degrees, their political intentions, limitations and concessions.

Boris Arvatov’s Art & Production forged a path for the Productionist avant-garde in Russia when first published in 1926, and before its author fell out of favor with the Stalinist regime.

As the devastating effects of neoliberalism are painfully incurred even by those (middle) classes once immune to the abuses of capital, the bygone world of applied Marxism is seeing a resurgence; consequently, its nuances have started to slowly emerge.