In September 2025 we said goodbye to an icon of Italian and Hollywood cinema, Claudia Cardinale. Known in the 1960s as "the most beautiful woman in the world", Cardinale enchanted audiences in classics such as 8 1/2 and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

Many auteurs gave her significant roles – Alberto Cavalcanti gave her a part in his 1959 romantic comedy Venetian Honeymoon with Vittorio De Sica and Abel Gance cast her as Napoleon’s sister Pauline in Austerlitz in 1960 – but the most pivotal moment of Cardinale’s early career was to be cast by Federico Fellini in his cinephile meta comedy 8½. 

We pay tribute to Claudia with a special screening of Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2. 

The film is probably the best film about filmmaking, told from the director’s point of view, and its hero, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is clearly intended to represent Fellini. Cardinale plays the up-and-coming screen star who Marcello Mastroianni’s creatively blocked movie director impulsively decides is his ideal woman who must redeem his emotionally wrecked leading character. 

It begins with a nightmare of asphyxiation, and a memorable image in which Guido floats off into the sky, only to be yanked back to earth by a rope pulled by his associates, who are hectoring him to organize his plans for his next movie. 

Much of the film takes place at a spa near Rome, and at the enormous set Guido has constructed nearby for his next film, a science fiction epic he has lost all interest in.