Shot in her final months in Castelgandolfo, nearby Rome and the home where she was confined to a wheelchair, “Ciao Anita” is an autobiography that affords a window into the heart, mind and soul of a screen legend.
Over the years film scholars have attempted to label Anita Ekberg, but possessing the gifts for which she was endowed, how could any or all of them possibly sum up the real Anita?
For the first and only time of a career spanning five decades, Anita talks candidly about her fellow actors and friends with whom she worked.
In an intimate setting, she opens her heart, revealing anecdotes of love affairs with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tyrone Power and Yul Brynner, who she describes as a great lover, her relationship with Federico Fellini and his wife Giulietta Masina and Gianni Agnelli her greatest love.
We journey back in time from her encounter with Howard Hughes as a young model in Hollywood, to King Vidor’s “War and Peace” opposite Henry Fonda to 1959 when she played the unattainable Silvia Rank, for whom Marcello Mastroianni pines as he watches her frolic in Rome’s Trevi Fountain.
It was said then that Fellini made her career with the iconic scene in the “Dolce Vita” but in Anita’s view it was the other way around.
With a wicked sense of humor Anita lays bare her soul for all to see, alternating between hilarity, sadness, dreams, her love for animals, the loss of her Villa and a wistful longing for that which she never attained on both a professional and personal level.
This film is a tribute to a woman that always fought with pride, for her independence, even during the lonelines of her aging years with heavy health issues.
Her passing caused us to interrupt the shooting, and only later did we decide that Anita, the Diva and friend, deserved the film to be completed.