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.