The film is a tribute and a portrait of Federico Fellini, told by Ettore Scola On the twentieth anniversary of the great director’s death.
Other than Fellini’s incredibly rich cinema – common asset for a worldwide audience, a devoted admirer of the incomparable maestro wants to commemorate a few private and less known aspects of his personality. He would like to evoke the privilege in knowing him and the emotions he would provoke in whoever listened to him, with his irony and his thoughts on "life that is a party”.
The film tells about their encounter in the satiric paper "Marc'Aurelio"’s newsroom, their friendships with Ruggero Maccari, with Ennio Flaiano, Sordi and with Marcello Mastroianni, the visits on each other’s set, Cinecittà, Theatre 5, and other analogies that cemented and endured their friendship in time.
From his debut in 1939 as a young designer, to his fifth Oscar in 1993, year of his seventy third and last birthday, Federico is depicted as a great Pinocchio that fortunately never turned into a "proper boy".
A brief film, perhaps a little cubist, made out of moments, fragments, and scattered impressions that will see an alternation of written scenes, reconstructed and shot in Cinecittà and the archives’ material of Istituto Luce and RAI, that made them available.