Our latest award-winning biopic on the life of Anita Ekberg, Federico Fellini’s muse, received over 100 international awards and recognitions.
Ciao Anita is a biography that offers a window into the heart, mind and soul of a film legend. The documentary was shot in the last months of her life, in the house in Castelgandolfo, near Rome, where she was confined to a wheelchair.
Over the years, film scholars have attempted to label Anita Ekberg, but based on her talents, how could they ever sum up the real Anita?
For the first and only time in a career that has spanned decades, Anita speaks openly about her fellow actors and friends she has worked with. In an intimate setting, she opens her heart, revealing anecdotes of love affairs with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tyrone Power and Yul Brynner, whom she describes as a great lover; her relationship with Federico Fellini and wife Giulietta Masina and Gianni Agnelli which was her greatest love.
A tribute to a proud woman
We travel back in time from her meeting with Howard Hughes, when she was a young model in Hollywood, to King Vidor’s “War and Peace” alongside Henry Fonda to 1959, when she played the unattainable Silvia Rank in “La Dolce Vita” by Federico Fellini.
It was said that Fellini had made a career with the iconic bathing scene in the Trevi Fountain, but for Anita it was the opposite.
Anita reveals her soul with humor, shifting between sorrow, dreams, love for animals, villa loss, and a melancholic yearning for unfulfilled personal and professional aspirations.
This film is a tribute to a proud woman who always fought for her independence, even during loneliness in old age due to health problems.
Her passing caused us to interrupt the shooting, and only later did we decide that Anita, Diva and friend, deserved the film to be completed.
HTM co-produced the docufilm Istituto Luce – Cinecittà which also distributed it.
