Pasolini — Official Trailer

added: Fri, Apr 12th '19

And though it was completed several years ago and spent most of 2014 running on the festival circuit, "Pasolini," a 1975-set biopic about the last days (and murder) of controversial Italian filmmaker/poet/playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini, will finally be making its way to U.S. theaters next month.

Bronx-born maverick filmmaker Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, Ms .45) directs this grim portrait of a complicated and sometimes misunderstood artist.

Four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe (At Eternity's Gate, The Florida Project) has taken up the daunting task of portraying the renowned, openly gay, political activist filmmaker who helmed such thought-provoking Italian classics as Mamma Roma (1962), The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), Teorema (1968) and Arabian Nights (1974).

However, it was Pasolini's final 1975 banned film, "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," a provocative fascist take on Marquis de Sade's salacious torture story, that mostly turned the radical Italian director into a taboo legend -- and perhaps, a martyr, as well, as his body was found viciously beaten and apparently run over with his own car, multiple times, on November 2, 1975.

"Pasolini," which has generated mostly positive reviews during its festival run, will be released in select U.S. theaters on May 10th, via Kino Lorber. In the meantime, watch the official U.S. trailer, above.

synopsis:
The Roman life and the imaginary worlds of Pier Paolo Pasolini intermingle in Abel Ferrara's retelling of the final days in the life of the fifty-year-old filmmaker and writer, in a lovely, haunting film that draws on his last interview and envisages scenes from an unmade final film and his incomplete novel, Petrolio. Willem Dafoe, regally exhausted, is the spitting image of the murdered director, and Pasolini's beloved muse Ninetto Davoli returns to "finish" his friend's work, but Ferrara wisely never attempts to merely ape Pasolini's style, instead offering one iconoclastic artist's tribute to another, a biopic that busts the boundaries of the form and a passion project decades in the imagining that gives Pasolini's final moments on the beach at Ostia the terrible sanctity of the Passion.

directed by Abel Ferrara

starring Willem Dafoe

release date May 10, 2019 (in select U.S. theaters)