Our trip to Bologna: Cinema Ritrovato 2017

Each year in June, we go to the nicest film festival in the world: Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Cool people, a fabulous city, splendid food, lots of wine and sunshine all over more or less sums it up neatly...

... but this year has been different, because:

We had something to say!

We got INSPIRED!

A little report!  

The ACE workshop

For two years now, together with Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique (a.k.a. Cinematek), we've been investigating new ways to index and organize film archives in a more-than-modern way. For Cinematek, curating one of the biggest analogue film collections in the world is both a blessing and a curse and solving the technical puzzles that arise when digitizing the collection goes beyond what a person can expect from a passionate cinematographer. So they turned to Republic of Reinvention to not only untangle the digital knot of procuring their fantastic collection, but also to "look into the future" and to make sure the archive is still around in, say, one hundred years.

Our vision on linked data, artificial intelligence, image recognition and automatic metadata extraction was explained at the ACE Workshop by Bram Biesbrouck and took place at MAMbo, Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna.

Click here to download the presentation or feel free to contact Bram for more information.

Two sample videos from the presentation at Bologna are shown below:

The road to Cinema Repubblica

While sitting on Piazza Maggiore watching D.A. Pennebaker's fabulous documentary Monterey Pop and seeing Jimi setting fire to his sweetheart, lightning struck. If people from all over the world come and see "old movies" in Bologna - and truly enjoying it- why shouldn't we be able to do the same in our little hometown Ghent?

Venturous as we are, we started planning a film festival of silent movies, organized in our own medieval basement (where all good ideas start). Of course, we would need a name, so why not dedicate it to the place where it all started? Cinema Repubblica was born...