When in the early 1960s Federico Fellini was making 8½ (1963) Louis van Gasteren spent some time with him in Rome. Van Gasteren considered staying in Rome but many practical considerations, such as lack of finances to entertain ‘la dolce vita’ in Rome and family life in Amsterdam, kept him from making that choice. Nevertheless, there is an affinity between Van Gasteren's style and that of the Italian director. While Fellini found Marcello Mastroianni, who functioned in many of his films as his alter ego, Van Gasteren became his own Fellinesque double in many of his films. As discussed in one of the previous chapters, we see Van Gasteren performing in the role of himself in HANS LIFE BEFORE DEATH. Van Gasteren also often features in his own films more generally, sometimes at the margins as journalist or investigator, sometimes as a participant observer of the historical events and existential questions he sought to express through his art works and films. During the 1960s he started work on his autobiographical film NEMA AVIONA ZA ZAGREB, in short ZAGREB. References to this film ‘under production’ would turn up in many interviews from the mid-1960s onward. Many reels of material for this film were on the shelf, several versions waiting for a final cut. Only in 2012 would the film find a theatre audience when it was screened on the occasion of Van Gasteren's 90th birthday at the EYE film institute in Amsterdam. In a way, ZAGREB is comparable to 8½ in that we see a filmmaker reflecting on episodes of his life and wondering in a very associative and intuitive way about existence, film, art and human relationships. But in its finalized form ZAGREB probably has more in common with Fellini's INTERVISTA (1987) where we see Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, the actors of LA DOLCE VITA (1960), in their old age, reflecting on their youthful selves. ZAGREB is also framed by Van Gasteren at the age of 90 looking back at the five years of his life between 1964 and 1969.

ZAGREB is explicitly autobiographical, featuring home movie clips of Van Gasteren's personal family life and the cultural scene in Amsterdam.