— VENICEA 4K restoration of "The Long Watch," a 1976 political thriller believed missing for forty years, drew an enthusiastic late-night audience to the festival's revival strand on Wednesday — an unexpected highlight in a programme otherwise dominated by the year's competition titles.

The film, made on a small budget by a director whose subsequent career was disrupted by the political upheavals of the late 1970s, had circulated for decades only as a degraded VHS copy and a single 16mm print held in a regional archive in Lyon. The restoration, undertaken jointly by a Bolognese laboratory and a Dutch film archive, has reassembled the work from three partial negatives and an audio reel discovered, almost by accident, in a private collection sold at auction in 2021.

The result is a thriller of unhurried, almost documentary patience — the kind of film that builds its case in small, accumulating shots of corridors, of waiting rooms, of a man making the same telephone call from the same telephone box on three successive evenings. It is not, by any contemporary measure, a fast film. It is, by any measure, a serious one.

A theatrical release in selected European cities is planned for the autumn. A streaming distribution deal, the festival's restoration team confirmed, has not yet been signed.