How do you know when a documentary about a moviemaking is working on you in spades? In the case of the charming new film Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, you walk out of the film with the intense, immediate desire to see all of the maestro's films again, tantalized by the healthy number of glorious scenes you've just revisited up on the big screen, and fascinated by the behind-the-scenes conjecture casting new light on a great artist's methods and madness.

Directed by Canadian Damian Pettigrew, Fellini is a real cinematic treat. Not a biography in any traditional sense, this is a film about the process of making movies, told beautifully from a myriad of perspectives: director, actor, cinematographer, writer and more.

A mixture of Fellini's own personal observations on art and life, interviews with major players, unseen set footage and healthy doses of film clips, Fellini is an sometimes serious, sometimes funny trip into the creative heart and process of the man who created cinematic landmarks like 8 ½, La Strada and La Dolce Vita.

Pettigrew has rounded up an impressive array of voices to flesh out his tribute. Among the chief contributors include screenwriter Tullio Pinelli, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and actors Donald Sutherland, Terence Stamp and Robert Benigni.

In most documentaries that employ a roving, talking head style approach to comprehensively gathering information, there are inevitably the interview subjects that don't quite compel. Not so in the case of Fellini. There's not a person on screen without something interesting and fascinating to offer.

Donald Sutherland (Casanova) and Terence Stamp (Toby Dammit, from Poe's Spirits of the Dead) contribute greatly to the Fellini myth. It's clear that both, particularly Sutherland, never came to truly know or understand their director, and that he in return didn't care about knowing them as actors. But yet, as they talk about him, there's a decades-later level of immediate awe and fascination in them that speaks clearly to the significant impact Fellini had on both.

Sutherland has wildly ambivalent feelings about Fellini, and makes no bones about Fellini's absolute control and manipulation, at times distance and lack of affection for his actors. Stamp supplies perfectly detailed anecdotes recounted with comic zeal about his first day of shooting with Fellini, and the master's reaction to a simple request for "motivation."

There's some great "lost" film footage that takes us behind the scenes on the set of La Dolce Vita, with Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni. But if there's one scene in the film that defines Fellini for me, it's a breathtaking moment of Fellini directing a ménage from Satyricon. He moving around the threesome, choreographing every movement, gesture, expression to the utmost detail, charting every breath to his actors, who follow like puppets. Suddenly we can feel Sutherland's frustration as an actor. But more importantly, when we see the final scene in the finished film repeated moments later, we realize we've just seen a vision of directing genius happen right before our eyes.

Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, is a movie that succeeds as a funny, insightful trip into the mind and heart of an inimitable and original artist.