To Save and Project – The 21st MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
Our annual To Save and Project festival returns in 2025 with a rich selection of newly restored treasures from archives around the world. This year’s program spans nearly a century of cinema, from pioneering German Expressionist works like Robert Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923) to groundbreaking independent films of the 1970s like James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971). Films from Argentina, Thailand, India, Syria, the Czech Republic, and beyond highlight cinema’s global diversity and the work of film preservation institutions worldwide.
Highlights include the rediscovery of Yevgeni Chervyakov’s forgotten Soviet masterpiece My Son (1928), found in Argentina and restored by GEM; the racy pre-Code Hollywood comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) from the Library of Congress; and André Bonzel’s Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By, a powerful repurposing of home movies from Janus Films. The program features restorations by major archives and funders, including the Film Foundation, UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Cinémathèque francaise, and Filmmuseum Munich.
The series opens on January 9 with the world premiere of MoMA’s newly upgraded restoration of Frank Borzage’s transcendent romance 7th Heaven (1927), and concludes on January 30 with the world premiere of MoMA’s new reconstruction of the long unseen, original 1918 version of Charles Chaplin’s World War I comedy Shoulder Arms.
Rosaura a las 10 (Rosaura at 10 O’Clock).1958. Directed by Mario Soffic
Rosaura a las 10 (Rosaura at 10 O’Clock). 1958. Argentina. Directed by Mario Soffici. Screenplay by Soffici, Marco Denevi. With Juan Verdaguer, Susana Campos, María Luisa Robledo. North American premiere. Courtesy Argentina Sono Film. In Spanish, with English subtitles. 102 min.
Mario Soffici’s adaptation of Marco Denevi’s celebrated first novel preserves both the intricate structure and social observation of its source while creating a uniquely twisty genre piece that begins as a cozy social comedy and ends on the far side of noir. Set within the hothouse atmosphere of a Buenos Aires boarding house, the film follows the timid painter Camilo Canegato (Juan Verdaguer), whose carefully maintained solitude is disrupted by the arrival of perfumed letters from a mysterious admirer called only “Rosaura.” As the other residents become increasingly invested in this unlikely epistolary romance, Soffici orchestrates a delicate dance between reality and desire, culminating in the physical manifestation of the enigmatic Rosaura herself.
The film emerged during a watershed moment in Argentine cultural history, as the nation’s artists and intellectuals sought to redefine national identity in the wake of Peronism. Soffici, who had helped establish Argentina’s studio system in the 1930s, brings his classical visual precision to bear on Denevi’s postmodern narrative games, creating a work that simultaneously honors and transcends its popular genre origins. Susana Campos’s multifaceted performance as Rosaura represents a departure from traditional feminine archetypes in Latin American cinema, while Verdaguer’s Canegato is a Chaplinesque delight.
Restored in 4K by Cubic Restauration in collaboration with the Society for Audiovisual Heritage, coordinated by Fernando Madedo and supervised by Luis Alberto Scalella. Restored in the original AlexScope 2.35 format from the original 35mm negatives in the archives of Argentina Sono Film, the owner of the film.