From April 12 to June 14 at SIFF Cinema Uptown Theater (511 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA). April 12: Variety Lights and Toby Dammit. April 18: I Vitelloni. April 25: La Strada. May 3: The Nights of Cabiria. May 10: La Dolce Vita. May 23: 8 1/2. May 31: Juliet of the Spirits. June 7: Amarcord. June 14: Ginger and Fred. Welcome Spring with a feast o...

What counts as "cool" exactly? It's not easy to pin down: as a notion, "coolness" is both frustratingly intangible and constantly in flux. In fashion, music and cinema, the genesis of "cool" feels heavily tied to the emergence of popular culture in the 20th Century – from the US jazz scene that first popularised the term, to the fashion world's pos...

As most millennials, I have often had to make do by working odd jobs that had little to do with my university studies. One of the most random, and yet absurdly incredible, of these was working at the front desk of the Grand Hotel in Rimini. Yes, that one, Federico Fellini’s second home. Federico Fellini, a towering figure of the 20th century and on...

Like many European nations after World War II, Italy was shaken to its core and in a state of reconstruction in the mid-1940s. While for countries like France or England, being on the winners’ side of the conflict made it much easier to go back to what was deemed as normality, for the Third Reich’s main ally through half of the war, the aftermath l...

Federico: This lady coming home, skirting the wall of this ancient patrician palace, is a Roman actress, Anna Magnani, perhaps the symbol of the city. Anna: Who am I? Federico: Rome seen as she-wolf and vestal, aristocratic and ragged, gloomy and buffoonish… I could go on until tomorrow morning. Anna: A Federì [“Federico” in Roman dialect], go to s...

Born in 1920, Federico Fellini is recognised as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Throughout the 1940s, the young filmmaker amassed many writing credits, most notably co-writing the screenplay for Rome, Open City, directed by Roberto Rossellini. This, famously, led Fellini to receive his first Oscar nomination.  By 1950, Fellini had co-pr...

As I walk through the gate of the 600-year-old Castel Sismondo in Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, I’m enveloped by a muttering voice. No, the voice isn’t my own internal monologue saying, “um, what is this trippy place,” though it does add to that sentiment. Instead, the voice sputters trains of thought in Italian, with notes and scripts from the...

Rimini in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy may not appear regularly on travellers' must-see lists, being on the eastern Adriatic Sea, a far less photogenic coastline to that of the Ligurian Sea to the west, where the crowds gather on the chi-chi Riviera. But Italians love it for wide, placid-water-lapped stretches of sand that are home to a pleth...

As part of our local repertory theaters’ conspiracy to keep me from spending any time outdoors this summer, over the next three months the Harvard Film Archive will be screening “The Complete Federico Fellini,” a comprehensive retrospective of the Italian cinema legend’s entire filmography, which contains more masterpieces than I can count on one h...

BAMPFA returns to the centennial tribute to Federico Fellini that was underway at the time of the COVID-19 closure in March 2020. Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was a masterful artist of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire. A central figure in the international art cinema movement that took off in the mid-1950s, he earned some of film’s highest honor...