Federico Fellini Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors. Fellini won the "Praemium Imperiale", the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the Japan Art Association in 1990. In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament” by his biographer Tullio
Maddalena Fellini dialectal play, "Stal mami" by Liliano Faenza, which got her unexpected attention and critical praises. In 1990 she made her film debut in the Marco Tullio Giordana's segment of the anthology film "Especially on Sunday", getting critical acclaim for her role of a lonely mother spying on the intimate moments of her son and his wife. Fellini was also an occasional writer, being the author of a humorous autobiography ("Storie di una casalinga straripata", 1992) and of a cooking book filled with autobiographical anecdotes ("A tavola con Federico Fellini", 2003). In 1995, she created an association with the aim to