Federico Fellini at 100

January 16–May 21, 2020

A centennial celebration of one of the greats of international art cinema, a master of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire.

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  • 8 1/2

  • La dolce vita

  • La strada

  • Nights of Cabiria

  • I vitelloni

  • Amarcord

  • City of Women

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • CANCELED: Nights of Cabiria

    • Friday, May 1 5:30 PM
    • Thursday, May 7 7 PM
    • Thursday, May 21 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1956

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    The great Giulietta Masina portrays the spunky prostitute Cabiria in this humorous and ultimately transformative story of the survival of the human spirit. “The masterpiece of Masina’s collaboration with Fellini” (Albert Johnson).

  • CANCELED: The Voice of the Moon

    • Sunday, May 17 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1990

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Fellini’s dreamy, almost Beckett-like story follows a young, moonstruck wanderer (Roberto Benigni) and his friend, a plump, aging actor, a Laurel and Hardy–like pair seeking to understand the meanings of life. 

  • CANCELED: La dolce vita

    • Saturday, January 18 7 PM
    • Sunday, January 26 3:30 PM
    • Saturday, May 16 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1960

    The May 16 screening has been canceled. Learn more

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
    Film to Table dinner follows the January 26 screening

    Marcello Mastroianni stars as a jaded reporter drawn to the decadence of Rome in Fellini’s masterpiece, filled with jaw-dropping set pieces of both excess and warmth. “Fellini’s bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting” (Time Out). 

  • CANCELED: Intervista

    • Thursday, May 14 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1987

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Fellini turns the camera on himself in this pseudo-documentary, which uses a Japanese TV crew’s visit to the Cinecittà studio as the pretext for a series of glimpses into the filmmaker’s methods and thoughts.

  • CANCELED: Ginger and Fred

    • Sunday, May 10 4:30 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1986

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni star as an aging dance duo invited to perform on a TV variety show in Fellini’s film, both a fond tribute to vaudeville and a withering assault on the meaningless opulence of commercial television. 

  • CANCELED: Juliet of the Spirits

    • Saturday, May 9 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1965

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    A bourgeois housewife (a mesmerizing Giulietta Masina) embraces a world of fantasy in one of Fellini’s most spectacular, imaginative works.

  • CANCELED: And the Ship Sails On

    • Wednesday, May 6 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1983

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    The admirers of a recently deceased opera diva gather on an ocean liner for a final voyage in Fellini’s opulently stylized drama, “a celebration of spectacle” (Vincent Canby).

  • CANCELED: City of Women

    • Saturday, May 2 7:30 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1980

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Fellini’s aging alter ego Marcello Mastroianni wanders through a woman-dominated dreamscape in this surrealist fantasia of female power and male sexual anxiety, the director’s fascinating attempt to grapple with feminism.

  • CANCELED: Orchestra Rehearsal

    • Sunday, April 26 4 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1979

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Originally made for Italian TV, this satirical pseudo-documentary about the tensions within an orchestra draws on Fellini’s collaborations with composer Nino Rota. With Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, a self-reflective wander through the director’s mind and the city of Rome.

  • CANCELED: Il bidone

    • Friday, April 24 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1955

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    The screening of Il bidone listed in the BAMPFA Program Guide on February 16 has been rescheduled for Friday, April 24, at 7 PM. We regret any inconvenience.

    Three con men pose as priests to trick peasants out of cash in Fellini’s sadly ironic study of misguided faith, whether in religion or upward mobility. The closest Fellini would come to film noir.

  • CANCELED: The Clowns

    • Sunday, April 5 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1970

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more


    Digital Restoration

    The Clowns also screens Wednesday, March 25, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Fellini’s tribute to the world of the clown is—like so much of his supposedly nonfiction work—part documentary, part autobiography, and suffused with fantasy. “Fellini turns the world into his circus” (Time). 

  • CANCELED: A Fellini Omnibus

    • Friday, April 3 6:30 PM

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    This program also screens Wednesday, March 4, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Three Fellini shorts originally released as parts of omnibus films: The Marriage Agency (from the neorealist anthology Love in the City), The Temptations of Doctor Antonio (from the Decameron-inspired sex farce Boccaccio ’70), and Toby Dammit (from the Poe collection Spirits of the Dead). 

  • CANCELED: Fellini’s Casanova

    • Friday, March 27 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1976

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Donald Sutherland plays Casanova in “Fellini’s most extravagant and courageous dream” (Albert Johnson). “The visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema” (Time Out). 

  • CANCELED: Fellini Satyricon

    • Sunday, March 22 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1969

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Fellini’s tour of ancient Rome is less historical document than decadent fantasia, following the narrator Encolpius as he searches for his male lover through feasts, festivals, orgies, and death. “A surreal epic” (New York Times).

  • CANCELED: Fellini’s Roma

    • Friday, March 13 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1972

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been cancelled through March 29. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Fellini’s episodic, “panoramic album of impressions in praise of Rome and the Italians, past, present, and future” (Albert Johnson).

  • 8 1/2

    • Thursday, February 6 7 PM
    • Saturday, February 15 5 PM
    • Sunday, March 1 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1963

    Film to Table dinner follows the February 15 screening

    8 1/2 also screens Wednesday, March 18, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    A jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) fantasizes on his next great film—or his next sexual conquest—in Fellini’s metafictional masterpiece, “probably the most potent movie about filmmaking” (The Guardian). 

  • The Flowers of St. Francis

    • Saturday, February 29 5:30 PM
    Roberto Rossellini
    Italy, 1949

    Cowritten by Fellini, Rossellini’s episodic tribute to the People’s Saint is constructed with crafty simplicity, rich humanity, and earthly joy. “A glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature” (Dave Kehr).

  • Paisan

    • Sunday, February 23 2 PM
    Roberto Rossellini
    Italy, 1946

    Digital Restoration

    An episodic, semidocumentary portrait of wartime Italy, from Sicily during the Allied invasion to the Po Valley near the war’s end. “One of the strongest antiwar films ever made” (New York Times), it was cowritten by Fellini.

  • Open City

    • Saturday, February 22 5:30 PM
    Roberto Rossellini
    Italy, 1945

    Digital Restoration

    Open City also screens Wednesday, January 29, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    A group of women and children (led by a charismatic Anna Magnani) try to shelter resistance forces from the Nazis. Rossellini’s moving, inspiring, and agonizing neorealist classic was cowritten by Fellini.

  • La strada

    • Saturday, February 1 5:30 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1954

    La strada also screens Wednesday, February 26, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, modeled her timeless character Gelsomina after Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. She stars with a brutish Anthony Quinn in this classic that Martin Scorsese has called “the cornerstone of Fellini’s work.”

  • I vitelloni

    • Saturday, January 25 7:30 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1953

    I vitelloni also screens Wednesday, February 19, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Fellini paired with the great Italian comic everyman Alberto Sordi for this look at the not-so-young sons of the middle class, (barely) growing up in the provincial town of Rimini. “One of the screen’s great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men” (Chicago Tribune). 

  • Amarcord

    • Thursday, January 23 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1973

    All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been canceled through March 29. Learn more

    Digital Restoration

    Amarcord also screens Wednesday, April 1, with a lecture by David Thomson.

    Fellini’s free-spirited portrait of Rimini in the 1930s, when fascism was a fact of life. “As full of tales as Scheherazade, some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiacal, some bawdy, some mysterious . . . a film of exhilarating beauty” (New York Times).

  • Variety Lights

    • Sunday, January 19 4:30 PM
    Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada
    Italy, 1950

    Variety Lights also screens Wednesday, February 5, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Following a troupe of small-time vaudevillians led by an incorrigible dreamer (Peppino De Filippo) and his fiancée (Giulietta Masina), this was Fellini’s first look at the passions and dreams of eccentrics living beyond bourgeois society—but not his last. 

  • The White Sheik

    • Thursday, January 16 7 PM
    Federico Fellini
    Italy, 1952

    Digital Restoration

    The White Sheik also screens Wednesday, February 12, with a lecture by Russell Merritt.

    Provincial newlyweds arriving in Rome get sidetracked by the wife’s obsession with a fumetto photo-comic star in Fellini’s solo directorial debut. “A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people’s illusions” (Chicago Reader).