Venice 83 opens with a restoration: "Deadly Sweet" returns to theatres in 4K

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened its calendar with the 4K restoration of “Deadly Sweet” (“Col cuore in gola”), a 1967 film directed by Tinto Brass, screened in pre-opening at the Sala Darsena. The film, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin and made with the graphic consultancy of Guido Crepax, had screened out of competition at the Lido back in 1967: it now returns to the same venue, nearly sixty years later, in a reconstructed version.

The fact that matters more than the screening itself is who made it possible. The restoration was carried out by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale, Italy’s public film archive, with financial support from Netflix. This is now a widespread model on an international scale: archives hold the materials, the expertise and the archival rights, while the costs of the transition to high-resolution digital increasingly come from private distribution operators, who in exchange gain visibility and, in many cases, a catalogue. The practical consequence is that the choice of which films get saved first depends not only on the public institution’s preservation priorities but also on the interests of whoever is paying. In this specific case, the available material documents the platform’s financial participation, but not the terms of the agreement.

The pre-opening placement is not a minor programming detail: it signals that a major festival regards archival work as part of the main program rather than an appendix for specialists. The 83rd edition runs at the Lido from September 2 to 12, 2026, under the artistic direction of Alberto Barbera.

The same shift — from the artifact to the reconstructed experience — is also running through archaeology these months. At the Museum of Rescued Art in Rome, “Oases and Deserts in the Roman Age” is open from July 4 to November 15, 2026, promoted by the Ministry of Culture and dedicated to the Roman presence in the oases of Egypt’s Western Desert between the 1st century BC and the 5th century AD. The exhibition draws on the work of archaeologists involved in Greco-Roman excavations in Egypt, with support from Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, and makes use of video art, digital reconstructions, excavation-site images, animations and artificial intelligence. At the Baths of Diocletian, until September 27, 2026, “Rome in Coin: Art and Power in the History of the Eternal City” reconstructs over two thousand years of urban history through coinage as a political and economic tool, in a distributed format involving the Museo Nazionale Romano, VIVE – Vittoriano e Palazzo Venezia and the Colosseum Archaeological Park.

For both Roman exhibitions, the information currently comes from a single source (the Museo Nazionale Romano’s exhibition program, as reported by Informagiovani Roma); no independent confirmation is available. The common thread remains verifiable: in all three cases, what the public will see is not the original object but a technical rendering of it — a rephotographed film reel, an excavation translated into images, a coin series arranged in sequence. The first upcoming deadline is September 27, 2026, the closing date of the exhibition at the Baths of Diocletian.

Sources: FilmSerieCanzoni.it; Lost in Cinema; Informagiovani Roma.