Event

La Dolce Vita

The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream successironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Romes rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.

"Fellini finds an aching, unshakeable truth about the power and rot of fictions, and the perilous state of existential being those who facilitate these myths and stories find themselves in." - Slant

"La Dolce Vita lives forever. Fellini may have set out to explore the outer delirium and inner rot among a subsection of pampered starlets, amoral gossip-hounds, pretentious socialites and funereal aristocrats at the peak of Italys Economic Miracle and burgeoning gliteratti culture, but Vita is a universal fable, as universal as Dantes Inferno." - The L Magazine

"Historians can laud it as the transitional pause before the director fully abandoned any neorealistic flourishes and dove into the psycho-personal surrealism known as the Fellini-esque. Yet everyone else will simply admire, in slack-jawed stupor, the way this 51-year-old time capsule thoroughly predicts the era of TMZ, Paris Hilton and celebutante overload. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. How sour it still is." - Time Out