On Thursday, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu presented his latest film at the Venice Film Festival, acknowledging its debt to Federico Fellini and asking the late Italian maestro to protect it.
The film, Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) is an epic comedy starring Daniel Giménez Cacho as a Mexican journalist and documentarian in the Birdman director's most intensely autobiographical work yet.
"Fellini is a patron saint, like Bunuel, Roy Anderson, Jodorowsky," said the 59-year-old Mexico City-born director of The Revenant.
"There is no cineaste who has not been infected by Fellini, just as no musician can do without Mozart or Bach.”
"His cinema is the most similar means of expression to dreams. And I hope that saint Fellini has protected me this time too".
Inarritu's is the second film to be presented in competition at the August 31-September 10 edition of the world's oldest film festival, after Noah Bambauch's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, which debuted on opening night, Wednesday.
