KATHMANDU: Their aim is to screen films from around the world for the promotion of a better cultural understanding. That’s Kathmandu Film Society (KFS) for you. The KFS has already screened two films — Bicycle Thieves (Italy) and Seven Samurai (Japan). This month’s film is 81/2 (Italy), a Federico Fellin film that won the 1963 Academy Award for best film in foreign language.

One of the greatest films about film ever made, 8½ turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of cinema. Guide Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a director whose film — and life — is collapsing around him. The director-hero is the centre of the film’s universe. He can do anything, and the possibilities confuse him. We see his conflicts between his love for his wife, his desire for his mistress, his ideal of innocence and his dreams of a harem, and we are given to understand he must come to grips with himself as a precondition to ‘creation’.

It will screened at the NTB, Bhrikuti Mandap on August 20 at 5:30 pm. (For details, call 4491508)