Rimini’s administrators are hoping the museum will attract both longtime Fellini aficionados and those who were too young to see his films in movie theatres. “We’re slowly rebuilding our city’s memory,” said Francesca Minak, an archaeologist and city tourism official. Along with the museum sites, the same square includes a theatre bombed and destroyed in World War II, now meticulously reconstructed and reopened in 2018, as well as a refurbished medieval building that was turned into a contemporary art museum, which opened a year ago. “It’s an operation that changed the face of the city,” said Marco Leonetti, one of the city officials who oversaw the project. The museum occupies two historic buildings, with a large piazza in between, effectively reconfiguring a significant part of Rimini’s downtown. “We wanted a museum that would go beyond primary resources exhibited in showcases, and allow the visitor to become an engaged spectator,” said Marco Bertozzi, a professor of film at the Iuav University of Venice, who curated the museum with art historian Anna Villari. The museum is at turns fantastic (pages from the so-called “Book of Dreams,” Fellini’s drawings and musings on his nighttime reveries, appear on a wall when visitors blow on a feather) lavish (it includes outlandish costumes from the liturgical fashion show in his 1972 film “Roma”) and bizarre (what to make of a gigantic plush sculpture of actress Anita Ekberg, which visitors can recline on to watch scenes from “La Dolce Vita?”). The real Cinema Fulgor theatre, where Fellini saw his first movie while sitting on his father’s lap, reopened in Rimini January 2018, after six years of restoration and refurbishment that involved fixing its splendid neoclassical facade and re-imagining the interior which has been redone by Ferretti in red and gold reminiscent of a movie set from the 30s or 40s.That description could easily apply to the Fellini Museum, which opened in the Italian coast city of Rimini - the director’s birthplace - earlier this month: a multimedia project that draws visitors into Fellini’s idiosyncratic cinematic universe. Rome in April will also host the “Fellini 100” show which, besides L.A., will travel to Moscow and Berlin, among other cities. This permanent installation, which includes a mock-up of Rimini’s Cinema Fulgor, which was Fellini’s formative film temple, is an extension of the new multimedia MIAC – Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema at Cinecittà.
“Ferretti often reminisces about how every time he ran into Fellini, Fellini would ask him: ‘what did you dream last night?,’ says Cinecittà Luce chief Roberto Cicutto. It’s called “Book of Dreams” and inspired by a dream recounted by Ferretti to Fellini that provided the basis for the director’s 1980 fantasy “City of Women” on which, of course Ferretti, served as production designer. In Rome, where Fellini for decades used Cinecittà Studios’ Teatro 5 soundstage as his “dream factory,” the storied studios are celebrating the maestro with an installation designed by his close collaborator production designer Dante Ferretti.
In the U.K., the British Film Institute has just launched a nationwide two-month series of Fellini screenings kicking off with “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and comprising “I Vitelloni” (1953) and “La Strada” (1956), for which Fellini won the first of his three foreign-language Oscars as well as 8½ (1963) “Satirycon” (1969) “Amarcord,” also an Oscar-winner, and “Ginger and Fred” (1986). The freshly restored “Sheik” has already “opened” as a one-off on December 25 at New York’s Film Forum.
16 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) with a screening of the director’s slapstick rom-com “The White Sheik” (1952) starring Alberto Sordi in the titular role, the first film that Fellini directed solo. leg of the official “Federico Fellini at 100” tour, packaged by Italian state film entity Luce Cinecittà, will kick off on Jan.