Photography by Doug Young
At the festival on November 10th, Scorsese led an introduction and Q&A followed by a screening of Leave Her to Heaven, John M. Stahl’s Technicolor film noir masterpiece starring Gene Tierney as one of cinema’s most dangerous and sympathetic femmes fatales. The film was restored by The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema that has been leading the cause of film preservation worldwide since Mr. Scorsese established it in 1990.
Inspired by the work of The Film Foundation, Sag Harbor Cinema’s annual event dedicated to film history and preservation started four years ago. After nearly losing the entire theater itself to a fire in 2016, the preservation and celebration of film is certainly a topic that drives the storied East End movie theater. The event celebrates the year-round efforts from Sag Harbor Cinema to uplift and celebrate repertory screenings and retrospectives (with past guests like Julie Andrews, Schnabel, Pennebaker, Warner Brothers, Columbia noir). The cinema has seen a 160% increase in attendees at the festival from year one to today, and a new sponsor for the 4th annual festival with Turner Classic Movies, with WB/Discovery as a sponsor for the two previous festivals.
“Martin Scorsese generously allowed us to use his name when we started this Festival four years ago. Since then, the work of The Film Foundation has been both an inspiration and an important source for my curation of this festival, as well as our repertory programs throughout the year – from films by Michael Powell, Emilio Fernández, Ernst Lubitsch, George Stevens, Marlon Brando, and Djbril Diop Mambéty in past editions of The Festival of Preservation, to John Ford, Sergei Parajanov, John Stahl, and Alfred Hitchock in our 2024 lineup. We are thrilled that he will be joining us in Sag Harbor,” says the Cinema’s Founding Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan.
