Marco Ferreri: Dangerous but Necessary

"An Amusing, Multi-Layered Portrait… The Great Visionary and Pathfinder Who Was Far Ahead of His Time."

Hollywood Reporter
  • Archive - Festival 34
  • Director: Anselma Dell’Olio
  • Italy 2017
  • 77 minutes
  • Italian, French
  • Subtitles in Hebrew, English

Marco Ferreri (1928-97) was a satirist of everything and a proud champion of bad taste, which made his films prophetic. His classic was La Grande Bouffe (1976), a descent into gluttony, drunkenness and sexual abandon that shares a heritage with the Marquis de Sade. The title is an epithet now, but who today can name the director? In 1976, Ferreri probed the depths of male chauvinism with The Last Woman.

Given the excess of his 35 films, and their prescient topicality, Ferreri was still mostly a filmmaker for cinephiles and the occasional anarchist. Anselma dell’Olio’s portrait, more aptly titled in Italian as The Lucid Folly of Marco Ferreri, celebrates a man of rich humor and sharp intellect, who said, “The shock I show is no greater than the shock we see in daily living.''


  • Director Anselma Dell’Olio
  • Production Nicoletta Ercole, Mauro Cappelloni
  • Script Anselma Dell’Olio
  • Cinematography Ennio Guarnieri, Alessio Iuso
  • Editing Stuart Mabey
  • Music Alessandro Micalizzi
  • Festivals Venice
  • Participants Isabelle Huppert, Roberto Benigni, Hanna Schygulla, Ornella Muti, Sergio Castellitto, Andrea Ferreol, Dante Ferretti
  • Source Nicomax Cinematografica srl