One thing is for certain: programmers at the Bologna Film Festival are equal opportunity film lovers. Cinema Ritrovato – the official name of this yearly celebration of cinema classics – is nothing if not eclectic.

This year the annual confab in the medieval city featured a retrospective dedicated to Italy’s premier screen diva titled “Forever Sophia,” and a curated retrospective of the works of Hugo Fregonese, the Argentine director who worked in Europe as well as his home country and Hollywood where he delivered reliable Westerns, Noirs and other genres.

The Last Laugh: German Comedies 1930-32 section presented films that encapsulated the last carefree spirit in that country before the encroaching tragedy of Nazism. The works of another German actor were the subject of a retrospective titled “Peter Lorre: Stranger in a Strange Land.” Screenings were also devoted to mid-century Yugoslav cinema and the films of Japanese master Kenji Misumi. And these were just the thematic series.

The weeklong festival that took over the northern Italian city famed for its university (the oldest in the Western world) and its epicurean culinary tradition, once again brought a veritable banquet of classic movies, most in pristine, recent state-of-the-art restorations, to an eclectic audience of scholars, restorers, critics, film historians and just fans of great films.

Few festivals can offer settings as massive as the screenings in the Piazza Maggiore, where more than 5,000 fans congregate every evening for the public free screenings that cap each day. This year the big screen included a showing of The Blues Brothers introduced by John Landis. Two silent masterpieces, Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim and one of the cornerstones of horror and expressionist cinema, Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau, were accompanied live by the Bologna Opera House Orchestra conducted by Timothy Brock.

Meantime in the restored underpass just under Palazzo Re Enzo, attendees had the opportunity to visit Folgorazioni Figurative, an exhibition devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the inspirations he drew from Renaissance painterly tradition to compose his frames.

All this as well as the usual bevy of screenings in the many theaters throughout the city, anchored by those at the Cineteca di Bologna’s compound. The institution that organizes the festival, guided by Gianluca Farinelli, includes the famed film restoration labs, among the world’s best-known facilities devoted to the preservation of film heritage, that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is honored to support as part of its film restoration program.