Cinerama Print Of ‘How The West Was Won’ To Star At Widescreen Weekend

The Pictureville Cinema in Bradford, UK, is the only public cinema in the world capable of screening three-strip Cinerama movies

BFI

The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, UK, has announced that a rare three-strip Cinerama print of the 1968 classic How the West Was Won (1962), loaned from Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome, will be presented at its upcoming Widescreen Weekend festival. The annual showcase, which celebrates large-screen formats and cinema technologies, is running from 24–28 September 2026, with this year marking the festival’s thirtieth anniversary.

Rare Cinerama Format

The Bradford Pictureville Cinema is the only public cinema in the world capable of screening Cinerama movies. An ambitious large-screen format from the 1950s Cinerama employed three cameras at once to create widescreen images that could only be shown on specially designed curved screens using three synchronized projectors.

Interest in ultra-wide projection has recently gained a boost with the arrival in cinemas of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which was “Shot For ScreenX”, a format that uses a dual-camera setup to capture 270° images that can be shown across in three-screen ScreenX auditoriums.

Horizontal Film Formats

The festival will also showcase Technirama, another vintage 1950s format with presentations of Anthony Mann’s epic El Cid (1961), Auntie Mame (1958), and the Western The Big Country (1958).

Designed to improve on the image quality of 35mm, Technirama film ran through the camera horizontally in the same manner as VistaVision and, later, IMAX.

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70mm Spielberg Print

The opening night of the festival will feature a newly restored 70mm print of Spielberg’s classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978). The director-approved 70mm-DTS print of the 137-minute Director’s Cut was restored by Sony-Columbia in 2024 and is shown in the UK for the first time.

Other festival highlights include a showing of The Sound of Music on 70mm and a special 25th anniversary presentation of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge on 35mm. There is also a special 35mm screening of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2026), presented as a single uninterrupted feature, and Paul Thomas Anderson's Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another (2025) on 70mm.

Last year’s critically acclaimed blockbuster Sinners will be shown in IMAX, though sadly only in Xenon 2K. While Bradford, National Science and Media Museum can lay claim to being the first IMAX screen opened in Europe (in 1983), sadly its 70mm film projector was removed in the “upgrade” to digital in 2015.

Let’s hope it holds on to that Cinerama screen so do go support the festival if you can, passes for which are on sale now.

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