Filmoteca de Catalunya, in collaboration with the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya (ESCAC), has completed a new 4K digitisation of Pere Portabella’s Pont de Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989). The project was carried out at the Filmoteca de Catalunya’s Centre for Conservation and Restoration as part of Visibilitzem el cinema català, a programme devoted to recovering, preserving and facilitating access to essential works of Catalan film heritage. The initiative also forms part of Acción Portabella, the international programme launched to mark the filmmaker’s centenary.
The digitisation was produced from photochemical materials supervised by Pere Portabella himself and cinematographer Tomàs Pladevall.
Filmed in 1989, Warsaw Bridge is one of Portabella’s most ambitious and singular works. Using the appearance and resources of a large-scale production, the film constructs an open narrative in which a mysterious event —the discovery of a diver’s body in a burnt forest— connects characters and spaces without submitting them to an explanation.
Tomàs Pladevall’s cinematography, Carles Santos’s music and the film’s precisely orchestrated mise-en-scène transform it into an architecture of associations. Warsaw Bridge thus becomes a space permeable to other forms of perception, guided by the freedom of its images. As Portabella observed, the aim was to “accept that there are other possible ways of seeing and being in cinema” and to surrender to “the pleasure of adventure.”
The new digital copy will have its world premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival organised by the Cineteca di Bologna, on 27 June 2026.
For more information, you can read Filmoteca de Catalunya’s website: link
