The new series of screenings and restorations of the 65th Venice Film Festival (27 August - 6 September 2008), directed by Marco Müller and organised by La Biennale di Venezia, will be dedicated to These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975). The project has been realised by the Festival in co-production with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale, the institutional organization responsible for promoting and restoring the Italian film heritage, with the support of the Ministry for Cultural Affairs.
As part of the Permanent activities and cultural collections that have been rediscovered and restored, the selection of These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975) represents the ideal continuation of the work started in 2004 and which, for all of the last four years, has successfully revived little-known areas of Italian cinema (Italian Kings of the Bs, The Italian underground, Casanova on the Screen, Tribute to Fulvio Lucisano, Rossellini centenary, Soldati, Visconti, Italian-style Westerns), alongside the international workshops of the Secret History of Asian cinema in 2005 and the Secret History of Russian cinema in 2006.
The These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975) retrospective is curated by Tatti Sanguineti and Sergio Toffetti and comprises the screening of about 30 films made during the three finest decades of Italian cinema: namely between 1946 and 1975.

To round off the series, there will be an “extraordinary edition” of restored films present in versions never previously screened, such as Dino Risi’s I mostri (The Monsters) with two additional episodes, restored by the Cineteca Nazionale and by Sky Cinema; Arcana  by Giulio Questi in the longer version never shown in public; and La forza e la ragione (Strength and Reason), an interview by Roberto Rossellini with Salvador Allende. There will also be a “Fellini special” including: Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, restored by Mediaset Cinema Forever with 20 minutes of cut scenes that have just been found by the Cineteca Nazionale and which mark a “philological scoop” concerning one of Italy’s leading film-makers; and the “crypto-documentary” by Gianfranco Angelucci amd Liliana Betti E il Casanova di Fellini? (And Fellini’s Casanova?) made for the RAI, in which Federico submits some friends to a screen test for the part of Casanova: Mastroianni, Tognazzi, Gassman, Alain Cuny and an exhilarating Alberto Sordi deeply involved in the part.