In the Birthplace of Cinema, History Still Breathes

From Eighty Years of Film Criticism to the Return of Ettore Scola: Reflections on the Opening Day of the 18th Festival Lumière

Narges Samadi | Film Critic and Festival Journalist

Lyon, France | October 10, 2026

In Lyon, a city inseparable from cinema's birth, history isn't confined to museums and archives. Film history still has an audience here. It remains a subject of conversation, and films made decades ago can still fill cinemas. Perhaps this is what distinguishes Festival Lumière from many of the world’s major film festivals. While the contemporary festival circuit largely focuses on discovering and presenting new works, Lumière turns its attention to what cinema has already created, inviting us to encounter those images again through the eyes of the present.

The 18th edition of Festival Lumière opened on Saturday, October 10, 2026, and continues until October 18. This year’s programme, featuring tributes to filmmakers including Ettore Scola and Norman Jewison, a retrospective of the Coen brothers, recipients of this year’s Prix Lumière, and screenings of restored films, once again places cinematic heritage at the centre of the festival.

Lyon is not an unfamiliar city to me, but returning as a film critic and festival journalist has been a different experience. Over the years, much of my professional life has revolved around international film festivals and encounters with new cinema. Yet I have long wanted to attend a festival that starts not with cinema’s future, but with a return to its past and a reconsideration of its history.

For me, the opening day of Lumière was shaped by two significant events: a discussion marking the 80th anniversary of the French Film Critics’ Union and an opening ceremony featuring a restored version of Ettore Scola’s A Special Day.

At first glance, the two events seemed quite separate—one concerned writing about cinema; the other, watching a classic film. Yet by the end of the day, both seemed to lead towards the same question: What allows a film to remain alive in our collective memory, and what role does criticism play in sustaining that life?

Film Criticism: Between Seeing, Understanding and Writing

On the afternoon of the festival’s opening day, a discussion entitled La critique de cinéma, l’art de donner envie — Film Criticism: The Art of Inspiring the Desire to Watch — took place at the festival’s Village Cinéma. The title itself could easily serve as the starting point for an entire essay on the nature of film criticism.

The event celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma (SFCC), the French Film Critics’ Union, an institution that has shaped the country’s critical tradition since 1946.

Participants included Nathalie Chifflet, president of the SFCC; Nicolas Schaller of Le Nouvel Obs; and Philippe Rouyer of Positif.

What made the discussion particularly valuable to me was not simply the professional standing of its participants. At its heart was a question that remains fundamental to film criticism, despite the transformation of media, viewing habits and our relationship with moving images: What, precisely, is the critic’s task?

Is a critic expected to pronounce a film good or bad? Is criticism primarily a means of helping audiences decide what to watch? Or should it move beyond judgement and offer us a way of seeing a film again, more attentively and more deeply?

The discussion title emphasized donner envie — the ability to awaken curiosity and desire. It suggested a conception of criticism that goes beyond the restrictive idea of the critic as someone whose principal function is to deliver a verdict.

For me, criticism comes closest to fulfilling its purpose when it adds something to the experience of watching a film. Before cinema is translated into words, it communicates through images, sound, movement, silence, time and the organization of space. The difficulty, and indeed the fascination, of film criticism lies precisely here: How can a visual and temporal experience be translated into language without reducing it to a plot summary or a series of subjective judgements?

This question matters especially to my own practice. In my writing, I have consistently tried to distinguish between recounting what happens in a film and examining how meaning is constructed through cinematic form. Criticism should not replace the film. Rather, it should help reveal dimensions that may have escaped us during our first encounter with it.

From Positif to Digital Media: Critical Independence in a Changing World

Holding such a discussion in France carries significance beyond celebrating a professional institution. France has played a decisive role not only in inventing cinema but also in developing film criticism as a form of intellectual and artistic inquiry.

Over the decades, journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Positif have provided spaces to examine and debate the nature of the image, the language of cinema, and the filmmaker's position.

The history of the French New Wave demonstrates how writing about cinema can become a way of thinking towards making cinema. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette were critics before their names became part of film history as filmmakers.

Within this tradition, Philippe Rouyer of Positif was particularly meaningful. The magazine, closely tied to Lyon, remains one of France's most enduring examples of specialist film criticism.

During the discussion, figures such as Michel Ciment and Bertrand Tavernier were also evoked, recalling the relationship between criticism, cinephilia and filmmaking across generations.

However, what kept the event from becoming merely an exercise in historical remembrance was its attention to criticism's position in the contemporary world.

In the past, film criticism circulated primarily through newspapers, specialist journals and established professional institutions. Today, social media, digital publications, and video platforms allow almost anyone to express an opinion about a film.

This democratization has created valuable opportunities for a wider range of voices. At the same time, it has raised increasingly complex questions about the boundaries between independent criticism, film promotion, publicity and entertainment content.

The discussion addressed the economic pressures facing critics, the relationship between media organizations and film distributors, unequal access to screenings, and the challenges of maintaining an independent critical practice.

These concerns point to an important reality: critical independence depends not only on freedom of thought, but also on the economic and institutional conditions in which criticism is produced.

A critic whose professional survival depends on advertising, public-relations networks, or distributor-controlled access may find it increasingly difficult to preserve the critical distance needed to engage with the film industry.

Younger critics and smaller publications face additional obstacles, including financial insecurity and diminishing professional opportunities. Under such circumstances, the question is no longer how well criticism is written, but whether it is possible to continue writing at all.

Nevertheless, the continued presence of independent publications such as Critikat, along with efforts to transmit knowledge and experience between generations, suggests that film criticism retains the capacity to renew and transform itself.

Perhaps the thought that stayed with me most strongly was that criticism, like cinema itself, cannot survive merely by preserving the names of its great predecessors. Its history continues only when new generations can return to films with independent eyes, formulate their own questions, and develop their own critical language.

Opening Night at Lumière: When History Returns to Life Through Cinema

A few hours later, the festival’s official opening ceremony took place at the vast, historic Halle Tony Garnier, transformed for the evening into a space for the collective experience of one of Italian cinema’s most remarkable works.

The selection of Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (Una giornata particolare, 1977) was more than a tribute to a major figure in film history. At a time when such reflection matters most, it offered an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between cinema, political power, historical memory, and the lives of those rarely included in official historical narratives.

Featuring extraordinary performances by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, the film follows the encounter between two people on May 8, 1938, the day Adolf Hitler visited Rome, and Mussolini’s Fascist government organized an immense celebration in his honour.

While much of the city participates in this political spectacle, Antonietta, a housewife, remains in her apartment. An unexpected encounter with her neighbour Gabriele, a man marginalized by his time's political and social order, alters an otherwise ordinary day for both of them.

Yet Scola’s achievement lies less in their encounter than in how he lets history enter their private lives.

Scola turns his camera away from the centre of political power. Instead of military parades, political leaders and enormous crowds, he observes the everyday existence of a woman whose time and identity have been consumed by domestic duties and motherhood.

Outside, the regime is constructing a grandiose image of itself. Inside the building, two people struggle, however briefly, to escape the roles that same political and social order imposes on them.

The sounds of the official celebrations, political slogans and propagandistic spectacle penetrate the building from outside. Events in the streets remain largely outside the frame, yet they permeate the characters’ lives.

Here, cinema reveals that history is not made only in grand public events. Sometimes the deepest traces of historical transformation lie in the smallest moments of everyday life.

Antonietta and Gabriele are both, in different ways, victims of a system that assigns predetermined roles to individuals. She is confined by expectations of family, motherhood, and domestic labour, while he is excluded from society because of his identity and personal circumstances.

Yet Scola does not turn this political situation into a manifesto. Rather than delivering a speech about oppression, the film lets the audience experience it through behaviour, silence, glances, and the physical distance between the two characters.

This subtlety has kept A Special Day alive for nearly half a century.

Todd Haynes and the Continuing Dialogue Between Generations

One noteworthy moment at the opening ceremony was American filmmaker Todd Haynes, who introduced Scola’s film.

Haynes, whose works include Far from Heaven, Carol and May December, has frequently explored the relationship between individual identity and social conventions, repression, gender, and the tension between a person’s outward appearance and inner desires.

From this perspective, his presence as the filmmaker introducing Scola’s work was particularly compelling. Although their cinematic languages and historical contexts differ, their portrayals share concerns about individuals society compels to live in conflict with their identities or desires.

In A Special Day, repression emerges through Fascist politics and the social conventions of 1930s Italy. In Haynes’s cinema, established cultural and social norms likewise frequently restrict individual freedom and the expression of feeling.

Bringing these two filmmakers together in the same evening illustrated one of the possibilities offered by Festival Lumière: creating a dialogue between works from different historical periods, yet still capable of speaking to one another and to contemporary audiences.

The opening-night screening presented a restored version of A Special Day. According to the festival report, L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna carried out the work for the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, in collaboration with Surf Film.

Such restorations matter beyond improvements in image and sound quality. Returning films to the big screen, particularly before audiences spanning several generations, creates opportunities to encounter works that many viewers may previously have known only through television or smaller screens.

In this sense, restoration is not merely a technical undertaking. It is part of the larger process of preserving and transmitting cinema’s cultural memory.

One Film, Three Historical Moments

One of the most thought-provoking aspects of watching A Special Day at the Lumière opening ceremony was how three historical periods converged.

The film is set in 1938, when Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were staging some of their most powerful displays of political authority.

Scola made the film in 1977, when Europe was still grappling with the legacy of the Second World War, the memory of Fascism, and the political and social questions inherited by subsequent generations.

And now, in 2026, audiences in one of cinema’s birthplaces have gathered to watch the film once again.

This nearly ninety-year gap between the historical event and today’s spectators raises a fundamental question: Why can a film about a single day in Fascist Italy still matter to a contemporary audience?

Perhaps the answer lies in Scola’s approach to history. Rather than simply reconstructing a political event, he reveals how power infiltrates private life—a process not limited to one country or confined to a particular historical period.

The film shows how ideology shapes how people live, form emotional relationships, inhabit gender roles, and even experience the freedom to love and be loved.

At the same time, it reminds us of cinema’s unique capacity to preserve the experiences of people often absent from official historical accounts.

History books remember May 8, 1938, for the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini and the spectacle of an alliance between two Fascist regimes. In Scola’s film, however, what matters is not the image of political leaders but the presence of two lonely individuals in an almost deserted residential building.

It is as though cinema turns away from official history to reveal another history — one written not through the names of leaders, but through the lived experiences of ordinary people.

Cinema and Criticism: Two Ways of Resisting Oblivion

By the end of the festival’s opening day, what mattered most to me was the underlying connection between the critics’ discussion and the screening of Scola’s film.

In the afternoon, the conversation revolved around the necessity of criticism, the critic's independence, and the future of writing about cinema. A few hours later, on the vast screen of Halle Tony Garnier, a film was shown that demonstrated the importance of preserving and re-examining cinematic history.

The two experiences illuminated one another.

If cinematheques, archives, and festivals such as Lumière preserve and exhibit films, criticism can sustain their life in another way: through reinterpretation, analysis, and the discovery of connections between cinema and the contemporary world.

No film remains alive simply because it has been placed on a list of cinema’s greatest masterpieces. Films continue to have a cultural life when new generations see them again, discuss them again, and ask different questions.

From this perspective, criticism should not limit itself to celebrating the established masterpieces of the past. One of its responsibilities is to maintain a critical distance, even from the most revered names in film history.

Revisiting a classic does not necessarily mean reaffirming its historical reputation. It may offer an opportunity to discover previously unnoticed qualities, challenge earlier interpretations, or even reconsider judgements long taken for granted.

Perhaps the true importance of a festival such as Lumière lies precisely in this possibility: transforming film history from a collection of untouchable masterpieces into a living experience, open to discussion and continual re-examination.

For me, the opening day of the 18th Festival Lumière was more than a succession of screenings and cinematic events. It reminded me of two interconnected responsibilities: cinema’s responsibility to historical memory, and the critic’s responsibility to what cinema brings into view.

The gathering marking eighty years of the French Film Critics’ Union raised the question of why we write about cinema. Scola’s film reminded us why we must continue returning to images from the past.

Perhaps the answers to both questions meet at a single point: What has been seen has not necessarily been understood, and what was once understood does not remain in memory forever.

Cinema can bring into view what official history has overlooked. Criticism, in turn, can help ensure those images keep being seen and understood anew, long after the screen goes dark and the years have passed.

In Lyon, the birthplace of cinema, history remains alive — not simply because films from the past are being screened again, but because people still gather to watch them, think about them and write about them.

Narges Samadi

Lyon, France | October 10, 2026