Twenty years after I Vitelloni, Fellini returned to Rimini. InAmarcord he calls on the free-spirited fantasies of his later films, aswell as the bittersweet comedy and intimate sense of detail of the earlyones, to evoke a year in the life of this small Italian coastal town inthe mid-1930s. Amarcord is filled with phantasmagorical gems from thedirector's imagination. But the film is also rooted in history, filteredthrough memory: focusing on one family of perfectly normal eccentrics,Fellini examines their impact on each other's lives and the impact oflife on them through a series of interacting tales. Fascism was a factof life and, for Fellini, a focal point around which to examine thecommunity, the Church, the state and the family-all of the elements thatmade Mussolini's acceptance possible. Like his protagonist Titta, a manin his fifties in 1972, Fellini looks to the past in this film for"the source of our illusions, our innocence and our feelings."But for Fellini, it is also a catharsis: "I made Amarcord to finishwith youth and tenderness," he said.