Italian movie great Federico Fellini's dreams will be on show at next year's Oscars, organisers said here Monday.
A Book of Dreams compiled by the director from 1960 until 1990 will be the centrepiece of the exhibition which will also feature about 100 drawings as well as set photos from the archives of ANSA, the Bologna Cineteca and Reporters Associati.
Entitled Fellini Oniricon, the show will run from January 29, just before the Oscar nominations are announced, until April 19, six weeks after the Oscar ceremony.
The show's curator, Fellini buff Vittorio Boarini, said the show was proof that Fellini was still revered abroad while almost forgotten at home.
He noted that the recent 15th anniversary of the director's death on October 31, 1993 had gone unreported by the Italian media.
Pupi Avati, the acclaimed moviemaker who is president of the Fellini Foundation in the director's home town Rimini, said: ''the relationship of our country with Fellini is marked by a profound disaffection but fortunately outside Italy, Fellini is a synonym for cinema''.
The LA show was presented at the Foreign Press Association here by Rome Film Festival chief Gian Luigi Rondi and Ellen Harrington, director of the Special Events and Exhibits section of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Fellini worked briefly as a cartoonist while trying to get into cinema.
The late director, whose visually striking movie masterpieces typically combine memory, dream and fantasy, once dismissed the sketches in his Book of Dreams as ''ugly strokes - hurried and ungrammatical notes''.
The 400 brightly coloured and often sexually explicit drawings, which were first exhibited at the Rome Film Fest in 2007, show the erotic and playful side that ran through Fellini's screen work.
Fellini, the maker of classics like La Dolce Vita, Eight and a Half and Amarcord, started drawing his dreams after meeting a Junghian psychoanalyst in 1960.
He kept up the habit until 1990, three years before his death.
In 1984, Fellini said: ''Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another''.
''It's a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream''.
Fellini won four Best Foreign Film Oscars: La strada (1954); Le Notti di Cabiria (1957); 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973).
