Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece Blow up is fifty-years-old. This documentary reconstructs, through interviews, the director’s journey in swinging London during the making of his film in 1966.

Among those interviewed is Antonioni’s ex-dialogue assistant Piers Haggard, in his first experience with the cinema before becoming a prolific director himself, the photographer David Montgomery, celebrated for his photos of rock legends, whose studio Antonioni visited to witness first-hand the techniques of fashion photography, and Jill Kennington, one of the most frequently photographed models on the London fashion scene, who took part in one of Blow up’ s most famous sequences.

Several protagonists of Sixties London’s counterculture also participate, including the writer Barry Miles, Clare Peploe, Antonioni’s friend at the time and later a director and screenwriter in her own right, Simon Napier-Bell, the former manager of The Yardbirds, the band that appears in the film.

A very rare interview with the widow of Ian Stephenson, the painter on whom Antonioni based the character of the artist and whose paintings are shown in the film, and a never seen before footage of young David Hemmings playing the poet Dylan Thomas for the theatre, complete the rich amount of visual contributions.

The documentary also revisits the film’s principal locations, including the studio where the scenes with the models were shot, and the park in which the famous photography sequence with David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave and the final tennis match took place. All these are brought back to life through the beautiful on-set photographs preserved in the Fondo Antonioni, the archive located in the Council of Ferrara.