In Amarcord, Fellini evokes a year in the life of the small Italian coastal town of Rimini in the mid-1930s with free-spirited fantasy, bittersweet comedy, and intimate detail. Though filled with phantasmagorical gems from the director's imagination, the film is also rooted in history, filtered through memory: focusing on one family of perfectly normal eccentrics, Fellini examines their impact on one another's lives and the impact of life on them through a series of intersecting tales. Fascism was a fact of life and, for Fellini, a focal point around which to examine the community, the Church, the state, and the family-all of the elements that made citizens' acceptance of Mussolini possible. Like his protagonist Titta, 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 finish with youth and tenderness,” he said.

Amarcord is repeated on Friday, January 23.