8½ (1963)
There is a man stuck in a traffic jam. There are people. It looks like the faces are familiar. No wait, the man is now floating up in the air viewing everything from above. Someone suddenly drags his feet and he falls all the way down to the ground. Our protagonist is having a nightmare! Fellini’s 8½ follows a filmmaker(Fellini?) who’s having an existential crisis of the intense kind; What movie to make next? he wants to tell his story but he’s afraid he doesn’t have anything to say.He casts several ladies to represent the object of his desire but none is hitting the mark; he can’t seem to choose. All the people around him are demanding answers and opinions to all sorts of questions. At one point in the film, he visits the church and tells the priest that he’s not happy, the priest replies: “oh, you’re not here to be happy.” his “girlfriends” who embody ladies with different quirks, attitudes, and ages are feeding him mixed opinions about himself; he's utterly confused.
Undaunted by all of this tremendous input from the world around him, he still wants to go ahead and make his film and share the "nothing" that he feels he is; the story has to be told.
What do you do when you feel an intense desire to say something, but all you got is nothing to say? what is the point of saying anything, and is everyone entitled to tell their stories? Our filmmaker concludes that sometimes you just have to forget about the weight of what you’re trying to say and how that will land and just, for once, celebrate life.