Federico Fellini Federico Fellini Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness, he is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked, in polls such as "Cahiers du cinéma" and "Sight & Sound", as some of the greatest films of all time. "Sight & Sound" lists his 1963 film "8½" as the 10th-greatest film of all time. In a career spanning almost fifty years, Fellini won
Federico Fellini docufiction both for cinema and television, based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning." As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now." In March 1971, Fellini began production on "Roma", a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella, "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from