Set to have its international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the first trailer for Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the Italian filmmaker, poet and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini, has premiered ahead of its upcoming Venice Film Festival premiere.
The film takes a look at the final days of Pasolini’s life and the confusion surrounding his death in 1975 as he struggles with the censors as he is about to finish Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, pausing for an interview with a journalist that allows him to reflect on ideas of sex and politics, having lunch with his beloved mother with whom he shared a house, welcoming friends and former lovers and his obsessive predilection for cruising the nocturnal streets of Rome in search of furtive sex [via].
Depending on how things shape out when it comes to my TIFF schedule, I might be seeing this one on Sunday, September 7, but the conflicts at the time of the screening are massive and it all depends on other screenings. Give the trailer a watch and let me know if you think it’s one worth skipping other films to see.
Pasolini is an upcoming biographical drama film written and directed by legendary Italian filmmaker Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, The Funeral, Welcome to New York) about the final days of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini (played by Willem Dafoe), whose murder almost forty years ago remains a mystery. The film reunites Ferrara with Dafoe after New Rose Hotel, Go Go Tales, and 4:44 Last Day On Earth. It has been selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival, asnd also scheduled to be screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Rome: on the night of November 2, 1975, the great Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is murdered. Pasolini is the symbol of an art that’s fighting against the power. His writings are scandalous, and his films are persecuted by the censors; many people love him and many hate him. The day of his death, Pasolini spends his last hours with his beloved mother and later with his dearest friends, until he finally goes out into the night in his Alfa Romeo in search of adventure in the eternal city. At dawn Pasolini is found dead on a beach in Ostia on the outskirts of the city. In a film dreamlike and visionary, blending reality and imagination, it reconstructs the last day in the life of this great poet.
