DOCUMENTARIES ON FILMMAKERS tend to stick to a well-trod path: unearth the cracked, yellowing photos or grainy home-movie footage of the director as child, insert scholarly interviews of admirers waxing nostalgic, heap on the gravitas voice-overs and paint-by-numbers narration. What's most interesting about Scottish filmmaker Damian Pettigrew's new documentary on the late, great maestro Federico Fellini is how it manages to stick to the vérité-tribute template and simultaneously succeed in flipping the old workhorse script. The subject's formative years are only obliquely referenced as a camera glides through Fellini's hometown of Remini, Italy, no omniscient tenor-voiced tour guide explains his career peaks and valleys, and even as plentiful talking-head footage pops up between the film clips, the lack of identification intertitles during interviews provides little academic reference (most viewers will recognize Donald Sutherland and Terence Stamp, who does a wicked impersonation of Fellini directing him with "you've been up all night drinking whiskey, doing cocaine, and fucking"; the other interview subjects come off as anonymous faces minus their famous names). Yet the film's diarylike montage of the master at work, first-person testaments to his legendary narcissism that are both deifying and damning, and the Fellini-on-Fellini confessional Pettigrew filmed three months before the filmmaker's death couldn't toe the tributary line more. Assuming you already know the basics of the man and the myth, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar's stream-of-conscious journey is full of personal delights that will have fans dripping puddles of drool onto the theater floor – what Fellini-phile wouldn't want to see him barking orders at wife-actress-cherub Giulietta Masina or his on-screen alter-ego, Marcello Mastroianni? I'd be a liar if I said this was a great introduction to one of the most significant "seventh art"-ists of the last 50 years. For devotees who need no primer, however, this intimate peek behind the curtain is priceless. (David Fear)