On January 20, 1990, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, quickly becoming a perennial Italian darling for international audiences, inspiring several movies, in Hollywood and abroad. A coming-of-age story marked by a passion for moving images as well as the craft and its craftsmen, it served to remind audiences of the magic of movie theaters, as well as celebrate filmmaking as an art, an escape, a therapy.

That year, the Golden Globes honored Born on the Fourth of July, awarding Golden Globes to the film, its director (Oliver Stone), the screenplay (Stone and Ron Kovic), and its lead actor Tom Cruise. On that night, Driving Miss Daisy won Best Film – Comedy or Musical, and in the same category, Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy won Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, for their work in that unforgettable film.
Tornatore, then 32 years old (he was born in Sicily in 1956), took inspiration for his film from his own experiences as a child in the small city of Bagheria, where he was born and raised, and shot his film. Set in the fictional village of Giancaldo, caught between tradition and modern technology, Cinema Paradiso follows the remembrances of Salvatore “Totò” Di Vita. Upon hearing of the death of his old friend and mentor, projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), Salvatore returns to the movie theater where his lifelong love affair with film began in the days when cinema had the power to bring the world to a remote village, and a wide-eyed boy.
The movie was and still is considered one of Italy’s best, from its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize that helped pave its way to other major awards, including the Golden Globe and Academy Award as Best Foreign Film.

“Cinema is better than life: with every film you are born again,” said Tornatore at the time, recalling how as a young man he went to movie theaters every day, sometimes twice a day, seven days a week. It was a time when, by the end of 1956, Italy had 17,000 movie theaters, the most in Europe, and a film would last in a theater for up to three years — before TV antennas began to cover the buildings’ roofs, and things changed.
The success of Tornatore’s film is also due to his fateful meeting with powerful producer Franco Cristaldi, who immediately believed in the project and also had the pivotal foresight to convince Tornatore to cut the movie down from its initial three hours to two for the “American” version. It is commonly believed that the shortening of the film greatly improved its quality, and helped audiences all over the world fall in love with it.
As a testament to the enduring success of Cinema Paradiso, an upcoming TV series written and directed by Tornatore himself is in the works for release in 2023.