With a title that translates as “I remember”, Federico Fellini takes us back to his youth in this rich and bawdy evocation of small town life. Inventively structured, the film is a patchwork of eccentric episodes and characters, at the centre of which is Titta (Bruno Zanin), a teenage boy going through the lustful misadventures of puberty.
The coming-of-age narrative links back to I vitelloni (1953), one of Fellini’s earliest successes, but Amarcord is typical of his later style in its carnivalesque show of oddities and wonders – none more enchanting than the sequence in which the townsfolk take boats out to witness a gigantic liner passing by in the moonlight. The film won the 1974 Academy Award for best foreign film.
