With Amarcord—perhaps the last of Fellini’s truly great films, earning him his fourth Academy Award—the director recounts the goings-on of youth in fascist Italy, paying no attention to how it actually was, but how it exactly felt. The film’s title is taken from an Italian dialect, translating to “I remember.” Like a daydream, flashes of memory populate this semi-autobiographical satire of common life in a fictionalized version of the director’s hometown of Rimini. Whether Italians really had a giant Mussolini portrait on hand at all times during the 1930s, whether his mother did in fact threaten to poison the family soup with strychnine, or whether the local tobacconist was as lust-worthy a beauty as recollection promises is irrelevant. In Fellini’s world, the art of storytelling through caricature is king. Amarcord ends just as it begins, with the arrival of “puffballs” floating through the city. Representing the coming of spring, these diffuse specks of white are as playful and transient as Fellini’s half-true mental impressions of this someplace, now vanished. – Julia Dan ‘26