Cinema Paradiso (1988)

A famous filmmaker returns to the Sicilian village where he grew up. He reminisces about the projectionist at the local cinema, his best friend as a child, who taught him to love cinema

The story is told as a flashback; it begins with a prominent film director (Jacques Perrin) learning in Rome that old Alfredo is dead and making a sentimental journey back to his hometown. Then we see the story of the director's childhood (portrayed by Cascio) and his teenage years, where he is played by Marco Leonardi.

The story fallows two main characters: old Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), who rules the projection booth, and young Salvatore (Salvatore Cascio), who makes the booth his home away from an indifferent home. As the patrons line up faithfully, night after night, for their diet of films without kisses, the boy watches in wonder as Alfredo wrestles with the balky machine that throws the dream-images on the screen. At first Alfredo tries to chase Salvatore away, but eventually he accepts his presence in the booth and thinks of him almost as his child. Salvatore certainly considers the old man his father, and (this is the whole point) the movies as his mother.

There is a village priest in "Cinema Paradiso" who is the local cinema's most faithful client. He turns up every week like clockwork, to censor the films. As the old projectionist shows the movies to his audience of one, the priest sits with his hand poised over a bell, the kind that altar boys use. At every sign of carnal excess - which to the priest means a kiss - the bell rings, the movie stops and the projectionist snips the offending footage out of the film. Up in the projection booth, tossed in a corner, the lifeless strips of celluloid pile up into an anthology of osculation, an anthology that no one will ever see, not in this village, anyway.

We become familiar with some of the regular customers at the theater. They are a noisy lot - rude critics, who shout suggestions at the screen and are scornful of heroes who do not take their advice.Romances are launched in the darkness of the theater, friendships are sealed, wine is drunk, cigarettes smoked, babies nursed, feet stomped, victories cheered, sissies whistled at, and god only knows how this crowd would react if they were ever permitted to see a kiss.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/cinema-paradiso-1990

A successful but jaded film director recalls his Sicilian childhood: he was a cheeky scamp called Totò (Salvatore Cascio) helping out in the cinema booth, learning to love movie magic and becoming a friend to the old projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), in a special place whose movies were censored by the local priest, and whose interior was designed to look like a church, with an altar under the screen. Cinema Paradiso is much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying