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
Federico Fellini maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner "SS Rex" (which is shown in "Amarcord"). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of "La Dolce Vita" (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934. Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as "I Vitelloni" (1953), "8½" (1963), and "Amarcord" (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions: In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini, with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to