November 6-9, 2026 | Passes On Sale October 3rd
Featuring films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Raoul Walsh, Elvira Notari, Roger Corman, Alexander Payne, George Pal, Clarence Brown, Med Hondo, Brian De Palma and others. Plus Intros and Q&As with archivists, filmmakers, and the Preservation Panel.
Sag Harbor, NY – The East End’s annual Martin Scorsese Presents: The Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation, dedicated to the preservation of film and its culture in all their forms, returns for its sixth year with a rich program of restorations, rarities, rediscoveries and special guests- including archivists, historians, collectors, and filmmakers. The Festival will be held from Friday, November 6th through Monday November 9th.
“From a female pioneer of Italian silent film, to one of the fathers of African Cinema; from a visionary Hungarian puppeteer to America’s ‘King of the B’; from Pre-Code to the New Hollywood; from Powell and Pressburger to Abbott and Costello: the lineup this year reflects the vibrancy of cinema -past and present- through a wide variety of genres, styles and ideas. I often find that juxtapositions open my mind. Which is very much in the spirit of this long, packed weekend”, says SHC’s Founding Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan,
Here below are some highlights of the 2026 program.
The long awaited reconstruction of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950). An adaptation of Mary Webb’s novel set against the magic landscape of Shropshire, starring Jennifer Jones as independent, nature-loving Hazel Woodus, the film was drastically re-edited by producer David O. Selznick for its 1952 American release. Supervised by Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, this new restoration, achieved through the use of BFI-held positive footage and badly damaged negatives, brings the movie back to the filmmaker’s original vision. Walt Disney Studios’ archivist Kevin Schaeffer will be on hand for a deep dive into the film’s troubled history and its miraculous reconstruction process.
Through their own work, filmmakers themselves perpetuate and reimagine the history of film. In that vein, the festival will present a brand new restoration of Brian De Palma’s tribute to Vertigo and other of his favorites Hitchcock films, the thriller Obsession (1976, with music by Bernard Herrmann, and a script by Paul Schrader); while in Alexander Payne’s provocative debut feature, the “abortion comedy” Citizen Ruth (1996; newly restored ahead or a national re-release) one can already see the Omaha’s filmmaker affinity to Leo McCarey’s special mix of dark comedy and humanism. Payne will be joining us live, via Zoom from Europe where he is working on a new film.
American film history would not be the same without Roger Corman. The Detroit-born director of such classics as The Little Shop of Horrors, X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes, The Wild Angels, The Masque of the Red Death, The Trip and The Intruder launched the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme and James Cameron, capturing the American teen spirit and the drive-in crowds with a wildly imaginative, budget strapped, politically subversive output of films, which he directed or produced. He would have turned one hundred this year. His daughter Mary will join us in Sag Harbor to celebrate his centennial.
Inspired by the real-life murder case of Scottish socialite Madeleine Smith, accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic, Clarence Brown’s Letty Lynton (1932) has been impossible to screen for nearly ninety years. Warner Bros. has finally resolved the legal dispute surrounding the film and restored the lavish Joan Crawford melodrama, legendary for its scandalous nature and its gorgeous Adrian designed gowns.
Pre-Code Hollywood cinema, a Festival favorite, will be back with Raoul Walsh’s rowdy police comedy Me and My Gal (1932), starring Spencer Tracy as a waterfront cop and Joan Bennett as the waitress he falls for. Considered by many among the best works of the prolific Walsh, the film will be contextualized through an “intro” and an “outro” by Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Artistic Director, and Rialto Pictures founder, Bruce Goldstein.
At the time of its making Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979) was among the most expensive African films ever produced, financed by a French grant, Algerian television, and investors from Senegal and Mauritania. With a budget approximating half a million dollars, the rollicking anticolonialist epic, shot in an abandoned Citroën factory where a gigantic slave ship was rebuilt as a set, was intended by its Mauritanian filmmaker as the African take on one of Hollywood’s most cherished traditions, the musical. Sag Harbor Cinema’s screening of West Indies will be introduced by Ashley Clark, Curatorial Director of the Criterion Collection and author of The World of Black Films: A Journey Into Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films. A signing of Mr. Clark’s 2026 book will also be held on the Cinema’s third floor.
Following the success of its 2023 tribute to ‘Pioneering Women Filmmakers of the Silent Era’, this year’s Festival shines a spotlight on Neapolitan early auteur Elvira Notari, writer, director and producer of about sixty features and hundreds of documentaries, made for Dora Film, the family-owned company she ran with her cameraman husband Nicola. Her brand of realism, attuned to the grittiness of daily life in the streets of Naples, was not aligned with the glamorous, aesthetic and escapist cultural values of Mussolini’s Italy. To this date, only three films directed by Notari are known to exist. One of them, ‘A Santanotte (1922), recently restored by CSC- Cineteca Nazionale and the George Eastman Museum, will be screened at the Festival, together with the documentary, Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, by Valerio Ciriaci. Giuliana Bruno, whose 1993 book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, rediscovered and reconstructed Notari’s formidable oeuvre, will be at the Festival to discuss both.
Having devoted programs to Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies, Walter Lantz’s cartoons at Universal and Fleischer Studios, the Festival brings George Pal’s Puppetoons to its regular “Kids and Family” slot this year. An architect by training, Pal developed his beautifully carved wooden puppets, animated through an original “replacement technique” using a different puppet for each frame. After creating animated advertisements in Germany and the Netherlands, Pal fled the Nazis and arrived in Hollywood in 1939, where his visionary animation quickly found a home at Paramount. There, he created a brilliant series of multiple Academy Award-nominated shorts, a selection of which will be shown in Sag Harbor, curated and presented by Pal’s historian and longtime friend, Arnold Leibovit.
Confirmed guests of the 2026 Festival include archivists Grover Crisp (Sony), Kevin Schaeffer (Disney), George Willeman (Library of Congress) and Cassandra Moore (NBCUniversal); filmmaker Alexander Payne (live via zoom); Mary Corman; Bruce Goldstein (Film Forum and Rialto Pictures); Ashley Clark (The Criterion Collection); scholar Giuliana Bruno; and Pal historian Arnold Leibovit.
Additional titles, guests and details, as well as the participants in SHC’s annual Preservation Panel will be announced in the coming weeks.
Sag Harbor Cinema’s Festival of Preservation passes – which give full access to the four days of screenings, special events, and the Preservation Party – will go on sale October 3rd at the box office or on the Cinema’s website, sagharborcinema.org, at $65 for members and $110 for non-members. The full schedule and individual tickets to the films will be released two weeks prior to the Festival.
The annual Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation presented by Martin Scorsese is made possible with the generous support of Lead Sponsor Turner Classic Movies and Festival Patrons Suzanne & Rob Harwood, with additional support from Suffolk County Film Commission and Discover Long Island.
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About the Sag Harbor Cinema
As a not-for-profit 501(c)3, community-based organization, Sag Harbor Cinema is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the Movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a long historic tradition of entertainment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.