About Us: Movie.it, The Painted Cinema

Over Sixty Years Alongside Italian Cinema

From 1958 to 2020, the Momigliano family's S.A.C. (Servizi Ausiliari Cinema) handled logistics, film copies and promotional materials for Italian movie theaters.

Film prints, trailers, posters, locandine and fotobuste: everything a cinema needed to open its doors and bring a new story to the screen.

It was an extensive and demanding operation, providing the daily link between distributors and cinema exhibitors across Italy. In January 2020, S.A.C. brought its distribution activities to a close. Thus closed a chapter that had lasted over sixty years, during which S.A.C. had been perceived by cinemas more as a traveling companion than as a supplier.

But over those decades, another story had also begun.

Surrounded every day by these painted works, the family gradually developed a deep passion for them. Copies of the posters, locandine and fotobuste for each film passing through S.A.C.’s warehouses were set aside and preserved, gradually giving rise to an archive unlike any other.

This daily proximity to the works also led to direct relationships with a number of artists and, later, to agreements for the protection and promotion of the work of the great Italian movie poster artists.

In 2003, Webphoto was founded, together with a platform dedicated to publishers that today holds more than 1.5 million film and television images.

In 2024, the activities of S.A.C. and Webphoto were brought together under SacWebphoto S.r.l., the company that now manages Movie.it, a project created to recover and celebrate Italy’s twentieth-century tradition of painted cinema.

When Every Film Was a Painting

There was a time when the face of a film was a painted work of art.

Not simply an adapted photograph, but an artist’s original interpretation.

From the early twentieth century through to the 1990s, Italian movie poster art achieved international recognition, becoming one of the most distinctive expressions of the encounter between cinema and painting.

Ballester, Martinati, Ciriello, Cesselon, Capitani, Brini, Symeoni, Sciotti, the Nistri brothers, Casaro and many others created a unique school of poster art, now partly forgotten, hidden away in archives, private collections and the few places where its story is still being told.

We dedicated our essay The History of the Italian Movie Poster to this remarkable tradition, tracing the evolution of the art form from its origins to the end of the era of the painted film poster.

Our Mission: recover, preserve, bring back to light

Movie.it grew out of this history: a project dedicated to recovering, preserving and promoting the work of the great Italian movie poster artists.

At the heart of Movie.it is a project we have called The Painted Cinema: a programme of research, recovery and restoration begun years ago and developed along two parallel paths.

On one hand, the professional photography of the S.A.C. archive, particularly rich in material relating to films distributed from the 1970s onwards; on the other, the search for works from earlier decades among many of Italy’s leading private collectors.

A project shaped by research, travel, relationships and passion, it has led to the creation of one of the largest digital collections devoted to vintage Italian movie poster art:

more than 18,000 films represented in the archive and over 40,000 individual works.

From paper to light: how we work

An archive of this scale is not simply digitised.

Each work is individually selected, catalogued, photographed in high resolution and given an initial digital restoration aimed at recovering its colours, the texture of the paper and the details of the original painting.

The final restoration is completed when a work is selected: every imperfection is carefully examined and corrected without altering the character of the original artwork.

The final print is then produced exclusively to order, in the chosen size and on the chosen medium.

Not mass production, but an artwork recovered and brought back to light for the person who has chosen it.

An open archive

Through Movie.it, museums, cultural institutions, companies and private collectors can now rediscover a cultural heritage that remained almost invisible for decades.

Every print purchased contributes to the recovery and preservation of further works from the archive.

In Italy, cinema was painted with extraordinary talent.

It is time for the world to see it again.