Generally considered to be Fellini's on-screen substitute, Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a celebrated director of several contentious films. Delaying the start of his next production, Guido is plagued by self-doubt and takes a cure at a spa resort. This resort becomes a theatre where the current dramas of his life are performed in tandem with scenes from his memory and his imagination. As the film progresses, the real world, reel world and dream world bleed together.

DID YOU KNOW?
	This was Fellini's 8½th film. He'd previously directed six features, co-directed another and made two shorts   Someone calls Guido "Snaporaz" in the film. This is the name of Mastroianni's character in Fellini's City of Women (1980)

It all begins with one of cinema's most famous prologues: Mastroianni panicking in a traffic jam as the camera prowls around him. Floating momentarily into the sky, he then literally crashes back to earth on a beach. Here we have a five-minute inventory of Fellini motifs: the collision of the everyday with the extraordinary; characters travelling through mid-air (Richard Basehart's fool in La Strada, the statue of Christ in La Dolce Vita); and an interest in urban and coastal locations which reflects the director's birth town of Rimini and adopted home of Rome. Here, too, are some of the colourful characters who parade through Fellini's handsomely-mounted fantasies.

If you've never seen it or simply feel like re-visiting an old favourite, this is an opportunity to revel in the beautiful music, compelling performances, award-winning costumes and rich, crisp images of Fellini's final film in black and white.