Amarcord

Member benefit tickets for the June 23 screening of Amarcord have reached capacity. See all screenings eligible for Member benefits here.

One of Federico Fellini’s most celebrated films, Amarcord earned him his fourth Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In an era of nostalgia movies, this portrayal of adolescence in a small town in Romagna during the 1930s was seen as a bittersweet evocation accompanied by the gentle music of Nino Rota. In fact, it was one of his most political films, exploring the anthropology of Italy: fascism, school, the Church, and the family are observed with a hilarious, ferocious, almost anarchic gaze. Writers like Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg understood this best of all, but the director had already stated it clearly: “The province of Amarcord is the one where we are all recognizable, the author foremost among us, in the ignorance that confused us. […] What interests me is the psychological, emotional way of being fascist: a sort of block, a halt to the sentence of adolescence. I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be, to a certain extent, permanent historical seasons of our lives: adolescence, of our individual lives; fascism, of our national life.”