CINEMA REBORN JULY NEWSLETTER #2 - Vale Tony Rayns, Solrun Hoaas's AYA to be restored, Mary Stephen at MIFF, Tom Ryan's Substack

VALE TONY RAYNS

Tony Rayns, the critic, historian, commentator, festival curator and great friend of Cinema Reborn has died suddenly. He leaves behind a legacy of scholarship that included studies of films by Wong Kar-wai, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Chen Kaige among many. But even more importantly he will be remembered for his lifetime of work supporting, encouraging and promoting East Asian cinema old and new to the wider world.

Cinema Reborn Organising Committee Chair Geoff Gardner was a close friend of Tony’s for just on fifty years since they first met in London in 1976. Geoff writes: “My friend Tony Rayns died a sudden death on Saturday 27 June on his return from Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato. It happened only moments after he got back to his flat in Brixton when he had a fall on the stairs within. There has been a huge outpouring of condolences and sympathy for his family and many people have been in touch with me to share how saddened they are at his passing. He was 78, had been in poor health for quite a long time and the recent trip to Bologna had been marred by the onset of some serious gastric pain. I took the photo above of Tony and former Sydney Film Festival Administrator Ross Barnard on Tuesday 23 June after we shared a (Chinese) dinner in Bologna, almost certainly the last picture of him. As a friend summed up succinctly, Tony was a colossus. I shall dearly miss him, miss our annual conversations at Il Cinema Ritrovato and miss all the wisdom about the cinema and about life in general that he accumulated and very generously imparted over a lifetime. RIP Great Man.”

Among the last pieces that Tony wrote were the program notes for our screenings in May of Yasuzo Masumura’s THE WIFE OF SEISAKU. You can read them here on the Cinema Reborn website.

RESTORING SOLRUN HOAAS’S AYA

The filmmaker and artist Solrun Hoaas was a dear friend to many of the people close to Cinema Reborn. She died in 2009 after a career in which she made a number of fine documentaries and a single feature film, AYA starring Eri Ishida, Nicholas Eadie and Chris Haywood, in 1990.

Producer and distributor Andrew Pike has now launched a campaign to raise funds to restore AYA from the original film negatives.

Solrun was a Melbourne-based filmmaker whose observational and personal documentaries made in Japan still have a wide following in both Japan and Australia. AYA is inspired by one of these documentaries, GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE, in which Solrun documented the varied experiences of Japanese women who married Australian servicemen after WW2 and migrated to set up new homes in Australia. The project will not only restore the film to the highest technical standard but will provide funding to reach a new audience with a moving story of a cross-cultural marriage and a Japanese war bride’s experiences in her new home in Australia. The Restoration Project encompasses the recording of interviews with surviving members of the production team to provide a rich “making of” documentary to support the film’s re-release.

If you would like more information or wish to make a tax deductible donation to this project here is a link to the page on the Australian Cultural Fund website.

MARY STEPHEN AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Mary Stephen

Many of the members of the Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn have got to know filmmaker Mary Stephen, usually when they have been visiting Paris where Mary has made her home for over forty years since moving first from Hong Kong and then from Montreal. In that time, as well as making her own films she became and integral part of Eric Rohmer’s production company, editing his films for more than the last twenty years of his career.

Now Mary has an almost blockbuster presence at the forthcoming MIFF when three of her films will be on view – her new award-winning feature documentary PALIMPSEST:THE STORY OF A NAME (2025), a newly restored versions of her 1978 feature SHADES OF SILKplus the short film A VERY EASY DEATH.

Mary recently posted this note (now slightly edited) on Facebook about the screenings. “I am grateful that these films will be shared with an Australian audience in Melbourne, 45 years after my unfortunately-lost film Justocoeur played there in 1981. Thank you once again to MIFF, to Al Cossar and Kate Fitzpatrick. Regretful that I can’t be there physically, but the heart will very much be and with a very special thought for Tony Rayns who just left us and who was so much a part of all this (in the same thought, a heartfelt thank-you also to Pierre Rissient, Frederic Mitterand and Derek Hill, I imagine you all having a great time laughing and arguing and watching over us up there.”

Click on the film titles for session times and bookings.

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TOM RYAN HAS STARTED A SUBSTACK BLOG

Long time Melbourne, critic, author, commentator and teacher Tom Ryan has recently started a Substack blog GOING MY WAY. It’s already full of reviews, news and commentary. You can also sample it if you click on this link which takes you to a fine and heartfelt tribute to the late actor Sam Neill.

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AND STAY TUNED FOR AN ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT CINEMA REBORN’S DATES FOR 2027 AND SOME FIRST NEWS ABOUT OUR PROGRAMS.

Please forward this email to any of your friends who may be interested in Cinema Reborn’s activities and ask them to subscribe direct or send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com

THE CINEMA REBORN 2026 CATALOGUE IS NOW ON SALE

Here’s the splendid cover of the Cinema Reborn 2026 catalogue. Editor Anne Rutherford and designer David McLaine have assembled 88 pages of superbly written commentary by 30 contributors ranging from highly esteemed international critics to a bunch of insightful young local writers, critics and scholars. 

In Sydney the catalogue is on sale ($15) at Radio Free Alice 136a Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, Store Hours: Mon - Sat: 11am - 6pm. In Melbourne its on sale at Asphalt Books,Nicholas Building, Level 4, Room 23/37 Swanston St, Melbourne, Thursday, Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

It will be on sale at our foyer Information Desks at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn throughout the festival.

For those out of town who would like a copy we can send it by post for $20. Send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and we’ll give you the bank details for direct deposit and post it off as soon as we receive payment.

On Criterion 4K UHD and 2K Blu-ray - David Hare discovers "A perfect rescue of a perfect movie" - TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

 Criterion's new 4K disc of Trouble in Paradise is a giant step up from the screening of a "new" restoration from Universal which I saw back in 2017 at Bologna. It was good, certainly better than the older UK and US Blu-ray discs. But it had quite a few work-in-progress problems. All the opticals - and they are very many - tanked the grain and density. The new print (I recall it was screened on 35) had tramline emulsion scratches through 80% of the picture, and there were sundry other problems. But it was good enough to bring the very youthful house that day to its feet in what must have been for them the first discovery of a total, seamless masterpiece, a perfect movie, and for me, a joyous reunion after first seeing it in a lovely 16mm print at the Trinity Church Wall Street Sunday cine club Screening Nites way WAY back in December 1971.

When Criterion announced this I wondered how much further they might go with restoration. In the interim Universal did a superb 4K restoration of Leisen's 1939 Midnight (another perfect Paramount 30s film) which played to a knocked out full house at Sydney Cinema Reborn back in 2023. That superb 4K was curated from a previously wrongly identified dupe nitrate safety fine grain and other elements which had been lying around mislabelled as safety 35 copies at the Library of Congress until Universal dug it out and discovered to their surprise near-pristine material.

Unfortunately Criterion released a Blu-ray of Midnight only back last year which was hugely underwhelming displaying massive grain reduction to near zero grain, lowered black shadow detail, softer edges and overall a really shitty encode. I had hoped Criterion would release Midnight as a 4K but given such a mediocre master like this what was the point. Maybe someday another label will risk the budget and coax a reliable 4K master for disc encoding out of Universal.

The story for Trouble in Paradise is the total reverse of Midnight. Universal appears to have gone full hog on this and Criterion has stepped up to what looks like a perfect 4K encode with a flawless 4K disc AND Bluray/2K disc. Everything sings. It's unbelievable, especially for a pre-1935 slower-speed-neg-film and faster lenses era.

The softness now is totally supported without a hiccup through the grain which while always visible is a part of the images' "lifeblood." One of the biggest surprises is not a whisper of density bumps in the opticals all of which flow seamlessly. Grayscale is total, whites and deep black perfect, silver and reflective jewellery and glass shimmer with nitrate sparkle.

A perfect rescue of a perfect movie. Essential to life.

CINEMA REBORN - FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER - 'Tell no lies': Four anti-colonial films by Sarah Maldoror and Flora Gomes

Cinema Reborn always hopes to draw its programme of new restorations from all corners. Our 2026 season will include two programmes devoted to the rich but virtually unknown cinema of Africa.  These programmes will be presented on a single evening in both Sydney and Melbourne.

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Mortu Nega (Dir. Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau, 1988)

4K Restoration, Australian Premiere

‘Gomes often says that cinema is rhythm, music, and above all, light. His enormous sensitivity to social nuance and his tempered optimism fill in the chiaroscuros of the everyday.’ – Ela Bittencourt, Metrograph Journal

The year is 1973 – the tail end of Guinea-Bissau’s eleven-year war against Portuguese colonial rule. A woman, Diminga (Bia Gomes), searches for her wounded partner, Sako (Tunu Eugenio Almada), among the rebel forces at a military camp. When the story seamlessly skips ahead to the mid 1970s, guerilla warfare has given way to the couple’s life together as celebrations in their fledgling nation are dampened by straitened conditions.

The first fictional feature film produced in independent Guinea-Bissau, Mortu Nega dwells – as its title loosely translates – on ‘those whom death refused’. Flora Gomes’s representation of the struggle of everyday life as just another kind of war, and of how challenges are dealt with through tools and processes embedded in the native culture, echoes and fulfils the desire expressed by the revered anti-colonial leader, pan-Africanist and poet Amílcar Cabral: for Bissau-Guineans to film their own people, country and liberation.

The latest restoration from Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Mortu Nega is 

part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film 

Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers 

and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, 

restore, and disseminate African cinema.

Introduced by Lucia Sorbera at Ritz Cinemas and Guido Melo at Lido Cinemas

For session times and tickets at the Ritz click on this link

For session times and tickets at the Lido click on this link

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Festa: A Trilogy by Sarah Maldoror (France, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau 1979–1980, 91 minutes)

Australian Premiere, 4K Restoration

‘In this trio of shorts, Sarah Maldoror interweaves culture, tradition and politics, somewhere between documentary and poetry, culminating in a singular result.’ –Annouchka de Andrade

‘In today’s times, it’s hard to imagine an artist – a Black woman, no less – being so principled yet so prolific, particularly in a medium as capital-intensive as cinema.’ – Devika Girish, The Film Comment Letter

Best known for her radical and groundbreaking 1972 film Sambizanga (Cinema Reborn 2022), Sarah Maldoror directed more than 45 shorts, documentaries and feature films from the 1960s until her passing in 2020. In 1979, having chronicled the anti-colonial liberation movements of Angola and Guinea-Bissau, Maldoror travelled to the islands of Cape Verde to document the nation’s first years of independence from Portuguese rule. Immortalising the period before the Guinea-Bissau coup d’état of November 1980, in which the union of the two countries was broken, Maldoror produced three shorts: Fogo, l’île de feu (1979, 33 mins), Cap-Vert, un carnaval dans le Sahel (1979, 28 mins)and À Bissau, le carnaval (1980, 30 mins). Forming a loose trilogy, these poetic documentaries beautifully capture the jubilance of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau’s Carnival and May Day preparations and festivities, serving as a testament to culture as the foundation of liberation.

Introduced by Annouchka de Andrade via video link.

For session times and tickets at the Ritz click on this link

For session times and tickets at the Lido click on this link

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MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher you wish to purchase.

EARLY PROGRAMME ANNOUNCEMENTS

We have already announced a bundle of titles that will screen in our 2026 season. For information about session times and links to bookings head to the Cinema Reborn website

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn charges regular Ritz and Lido admission prices with the lowest student discount tickets of any festival. We keep to these admission charges thanks to tax deductible donations from our friends and supporters. We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size, large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

Bill