NEW FELLINI-IM A BORN LIAR (DVD)

Details

• Release Year: 2002
• Genre: Documentary
• Plot: There have been other documentary portraits of Fellini over the years, but what sets Fellini: I’m a Born Liar apart from its many predecessors is a twofold advantage. The first is that Pettigrew -- who got to know Fellini fairly well after meeting him in 1983 -- was afforded a lengthy, privileged, unprecedented access to the man himself.; ; Pettigrew filmed ten hours of conversation with Fellini himself, who pronounced the result “The longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision.” He supplements and often playfully contradicts Fellini’s remarks with a variety of in-depth conversations with Fellini’s intimates and key collaborators. Novelist Italo Calvino illuminates the boundaries Fellini mapped between illusion and reality. Lifelong friends Titta Benzi and painter Rinaldo Geleng give an insight into Fellini’s boyhood, as well as his great creative marriage with actress Giulietta Masina. Screenwriter Tullio Pinelli (whose credits include La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 and The Voice of the Moon), cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno (who photographed Roma, Amarcord, Casanova, City of Women, And the Ship Sails On, among others), actors Donald Sutherland (Casanova) and Terence Stamp (Toby Dammit) each contribute valuable insight into the Maestro’s working methods, and working madness.; ; Pettigrew not only juxtaposes these interviews with classic clips. Most importantly, he literally retraces Fellini’s footsteps, bringing back original, up-to-date footage of the precise places where Fellini made such masterpieces as I Vitelloni (1953), Nights of Cabiria (1957), and 8 1/2, the better to dramatize the world of Fellini’s vision by repeatedly showing us the same world minus that vision. What results is thus no mere biographical portrait but an energetic philosophical inquiry on the order of Orson Welles’s F For Fake.
• Cast: Roberto Benigni, Luigi 'Titta' Benzi, Italo Calvino, Dante Ferretti, Rinaldo Geleng, Tullio Pinelli, Giuseppe Rotunno, Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, Federico Fellini, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Cuny, Ennio Flaiano, Ettore Manni, Giulietta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni, Nanni Moretti, Damian Pettigrew, Olivier Gal
• Director: Damian Pettigrew
• Runtime: 1:45
• Company: First Look Pictures
• Media Format: Movie