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During the Fascist era in Italy, the state-controlled L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa produced newsreels and documentaries promoting the regime's achievements. By the 1930s, LUCE's films were screened to Italian immigrant audiences abroad in order to engage spectators already sympathetic or potentially allied to the Fascist agenda. In this article, I discuss the distribution and reception in Britain of Camicia nera (1933), a film produced by LUCE to mark the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's rise to power and often referred to as "the film of the Decennial". Employing records retrieved from state archives and contemporary British sources from the period of the film's release, I revisit the history of one of the most important official films of the Fascist era and offer a new perspective on the dynamics and actual applications of Italian propaganda operations abroad during the 1930s.

This data paper and the data collection from which it emerges aim to present a fully harmonized data set originating in several research projects on post-war cinema programming. The paper will reflect on the collection and structure of this aggregated data set, that consists of titles of feature films screened for public viewing in cinemas in the cities Bari (Italy), Antwerp and Ghent (Belgium), Gothenburg (Sweden), Leicester (United Kingdom) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) for the year 1952. As comparisons of movie-going patterns between European countries are still rare, this paper offers a model for constructing a data set which can be replicated, scaled up and used to compare, contextualize, and eventually theorize practices of cinema-going across countries at a global level.