The movie is a tribute to and a portrait of Federico Fellini, told by Ettore Scola on the twentieth anniversary of the great director’s death.
Other than Fellini’s incredibly rich cinema – a shared treasure for a worldwide audience – a devoted admirer of the incomparable maestro wants to commemorate a few private and lesser-known aspects of Fellini’s personality. He would like to evoke the privilege of knowing him and the emotions he provoked in all who listened to him with his irony and his thoughts on "life as a party”.
The film recounts their encounter in the newsroom of the satirical paper "Marc'Aurelio", their friendships with Ruggero Maccari, Ennio Flaiano, Alberto Sordi and Marcello Mastroianni, the mutual visits to their sets in the mythical Theatre 5 of Cinecittà Studios and other shared experiences that cemented their enduring friendship.
From his debut in 1939 as a young designer to his fifth Oscar in 1993, year of his seventy-third and last birthday, Federico is depicted as a great Pinocchio that fortunately never turned into a "proper boy".
A brief film, perhaps a little cubist, made out of moments, fragments, and scattered impressions in an alternation of scripted scenes, reconstructed and shot in Cinecittà and archive material made available by Istituto Luce and RAI.
