![]() ![]() Today’s multiplex offers nothing like the experience of the grand cinema auditorium of a few decades ago. Plush seating and wooden armrests have been replaced with polyurethane seats, linoleum wipe clean floors where the sound bounces around the auditorium often deafening the viewer. The film is beautiful in the way it captures cinema as an experience and returns us to a time when cinemas were magnificent palaces with elegant baroque proscenium and the swish of rich red velvet curtains. The local cinema is a source of cheap entertainment and escape for six-year old Salvatore, nicknamed Toto, who finds refuge in the dark watching black and white film footage under the watchful eye of the etruscan father substitute figure Alfredo. The story is set in a Sicilian village just after the Second World War, where a small boy, like many other children, has lost his father. Nostalgic and touching in its telling of a small boy’s joy of cinema and his relationship with the projectionist (Philippe Noiret). ‘Cinema Paradiso’ consistently appears in lists of top 100 best films ever made. It’s more than 25 years since ‘Cinema Paradiso’ was first released and it has subsequently been re-released all over the world. A film which ponders the cinema viewing experience. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and also an Oscar in the foreign language category in 1989, this was, and still is a film lovers’ film about film, made by a film neophyte (Giuseppe Tornatore). Yet on its release in Italy, it practically disappeared overnight and was a box-office flop. This is one of the most successful foreign-language films ever made.
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