Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria). 1957. Italy. Directed by Federico Fellini. Screenplay by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano. With Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Amadeo Nazzari, Franca Marzi. Music by Nino Rota. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K DCP restoration by TF1 Studio and Studiocanal, with the support of the CNC. Restored from an interpositive and French and Italian soundtrack negatives. Digital and photochemical restoration work carried out by L'image Retrouvée.. 117 min.
The nights of Cabiria, a prostitute in Rome, often end in despair, but there’s always something unbreakable about her. This resilient character, immortalized by Giulietta Masina’s wholehearted performance (which won her the Best Actress award at Cannes), first appeared in a brief cameo in The White Sheik (1952). That appearance made its mark, and when Fellini met a prostitute who recounted her stories while he was making Il Bidone (1955), the idea for this film was born. The heartbreaking tale became the second Fellini film (after La Strada) to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was familiar with the language of Rome’s underworld, contributed to the dialogue. Seen for decades only in poor dupe copies, Rialto’s 1998 35mm reissue, created from the best elements of several international archives, featured a fresh new translation and subtitles (by Bruce Goldstein and Giulia D’Agnolo; revised in 2020 by Goldstein and Fiamma Arditi) and the premiere of the seven-minute “Man with the Sack” sequence, cut from earlier release prints against Fellini’s wishes.