OUR STORY

Over 60 years alongside Italian cinemas

How a story of logistics became a cultural mission

For over sixty years, S.A.C. – Servizi Ausiliari Cinema has accompanied every film that has been released in Italian cinemas. Film copies, trailers, posters, flyers, stills: everything a cinema needed to open its doors and turn on the lights. A widespread activity, an essential link between the distributors and all the cinemas in Italy.

In January 2020, that activity came to an end. But over the course of those decades, SAC had kept something precious: since the early 1970s, every poster, every flyer, every still distributed to cinemas had been kept, catalogued and preserved, without yet knowing why. Over time, SAC has also acquired the exploitation rights to the works of most of the Italian Master Poster Painters.

In 2003, SAC's owners had already looked ahead, creating Webphoto S.r.l. : a company dedicated to managing the aforementioned rights and enhancing an archive, included in the portal www.webphoto.it, which contains over 1,500,000 cinema and TV images, still constantly updated today, and is mainly reserved for publishers and not open to the public. In 2024, Webphoto was incorporated into SAC, giving rise to SacWebphoto S.r.l., the sole entity that also manages Movie.it, a very ambitious project, launched in 2019, for the recovery and enhancement of all pictorial works relating to 20th-century films.

THE GOLDEN AGE

When every film was a painting

The Italian school of Master Poster Painters

There was a time when every film that came to Italian cinemas brought with it a work of art. Not a reproduction, not a retouched photograph: a painting. A painter sat in front of the canvas and translated the soul of a film into colours, shapes and glances.

Between the 1920s and the early 1990s, Italian posters were universally recognised as the most beautiful and artistically refined. The names of these artists were Ballester, Martinati, Ciriello, Cesselon, Capitani, Brini, Simeoni, Sciotti, the Nistri brothers, Casaro and many others. They are known as the Italian Master Poster Painters: they created a unique artistic school, born from the encounter between cinema and painting, which is now almost forgotten, hidden in the archives, and partly lost.

THE MISSION

Movie.it's mission has become to recover, restore and make accessible as many of these masterpieces as possible. An ambitious goal, which also aims to build a cultural bridge between the past and the future.

The Rediscovered Poster

Years of work for the most comprehensive digital collection ever created

The project required years of work on several fronts. The first: to professionally photograph the entire SAC archive, with multiple shots per subject.

The second: to track down the major Italian private collectors to recover everything that was not present in the archive, in particular the works from the decades prior to the creation of the SAC. A huge undertaking, involving research, travel, relationships and passion.

The result is the most complete high definition digital collection of vintage posters, playbills and photobuste ever created: 18.000+ Film in catalogo - 40.000+ Opere.