ROME: Nicole Kidman opened Rome’s first international film festival on Friday with an intense portrayal of photographer Diane Arbus, who shocked America in the 1960s with her disturbing pictures of people on the fringes of society.

Director Steven Shainberg’s ‘Fur’ mixes reality with fantasy to explore Diane Arbus’s transformation from the posh, repressed housewife of a fashion photographer into one of the most daring artists of her time.

That metamorphosis is seen through Arbus’s intimate friendship with her bizarre neighbour Lionel, played by Robert Downey Jr, whose body is completely covered with hair because of a medical condition.

Like most of the events and characters in the film, loosely based on Patricia Bosworth’s biography of the photographer, their relationship is invented.

“It’s not a biography,” Kidman told reporters after a press screening of the film, which was premiering in Rome.

“It’s more about walking into your own creativity, discovering what you are like inside and what you want to say to the world,” she said.

Arbus became an icon of modern photography for her ground-breaking portraits of a world of outcasts — among her favourite subjects were dwarves, giants, prostitutes, transvestites, homeless and mentally ill people.

“In the same way you have acting in your blood, you have art, whatever that is, in your blood from the minute you are born,” Kidman said, adding: “Arbus had that.”

Steven Shainberg, whose uncle was a close friend of Arbus, said he grew up with her pictures hanging on the walls of his home at a time when the photographer was struggling to win recognition for her unconventional art.

ENCASED IN A BOX: As an adult, Shainberg collected her photographs and long nurtured the idea of making a film about her.