The Il Cinema Ritrovato is held every year in Bologna, Italy and is a prestigious international festival of classic and silent film. The festival has an awards competition for Blu-rays and DVDs that were released the previous year. 5 awards are given out for different categories, and also each of the competition’s jurors selects a release for a Personal Choice Award.
We submit one or two Undercrank Productions releases every year, and one of them often gets nominated as one of the many finalists. The competition is stiff, as there are submissions from Criterion, Kino, Flicker Alley, and many of the other high-end labels and archives around the globe. This year, the Raymond Griffith disc was not only nominated, but was also given a Personal Choice Award by juror Philippe Garnier at the ceremony last night!
The list of this year’s award winners is here, and the list of 2024’s nominees is here.
Philippe Garnier’s write-up about the Raymond Griffith Blu-ray and why he chose it as his personal choice award this year:
Raymond Griffith was truly the silent man of silent movies: diphtheria permanently damaged his vocal cords when he was a boy. And he died choking on a bone in 1957. Some people only have irresistible biographies, but this accomplished comedian who started on the stage at age seven became a popular class act in the 1920s. With his wry smile and his silk hat, at Paramount he treaded more on Lubitsch’s territory than on Mack Sennett’s, for whom he’d also worked as a writer and gag man. Almost as complex in plot and situation comedy as his most well-known surviving picture Hands Up! (1926), Paths to Paradise (1925): the best of the two films featured on this Blu-ray disk, is the best introduction to this largely forgotten artist.
from the Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024 page listing this year’s Blu-ray/DVD award winners
Here are photos of this year’s award winners, taken and sent to me by Valerio Greco. Look how nicely the Raymond Griffith Blu-ray fits in with all of these — thanks to the brilliant graphic design by Marlene Weisman.
This is not Undercrank Productions’ first award from the Cinema Ritrovato festival, BTW. In 2015 our Marcel Perez Collection DVD won a “Special Mention” award, and in 2022, our Edward Everett Horton DVD won “Best Rediscovery of a Forgotten Film” as well as a Personal Choice Award.
The Raymond Griffith Blu-ray was funded by 536 fans via a Kickstarter campaign that ran in March 2022. The disc was released by Undercrank Productions on both Blu-ray and DVD in June 2023, and is available from many online retailers such as DeepDiscount, Critics’ Choice, Amazon and — for fans outside the USA — on WowHD.