How Strange to be Named Federico

Ettore Scola made a film about Federico Fellini on the twentieth anniversary of his death. Both of them had worked in their youth at the satirical magazine Marc'Aurelio; Scola drew there, and so did Fellini. The film starts from that. Then come Fellini's love of driving around Rome at night, his sleeplessness, the faces he drew, how he worked on set and how he chose people. The film is neither documentary nor fiction: archive footage, pieces of Fellini's own films and scenes restaged in a studio run into one another. An actor plays the young Fellini. Scola is not writing a biography, he is describing a friend, and he does not hide it; the telling is entirely personal. This was Scola's last film. Among the works made about Fellini it is counted the least official and the best loved.