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"Pasolini is terrific … a work of startling maturity from this incorrigible tearaway, a minor-key dream that finally turns towards darkness." – The Guardian
It is the 2nd of November, 1975. Pier Paolo Pasolini (portrayed convincingly here by Willem Dafoe) is putting the finishing touches on his notorious masterpiece Salò. Over the course of 24 hours, he will sit for interviews, continue work on a new screenplay and pick up a male prostitute. By morning, he will be dead.
Pasolini's murder remains one of cinema's greatest tragedies and unsolved mysteries. In this lyrical recreation of the master filmmaker, poet and iconoclast's last day – intercut with imaginatively staged sequences from the film Pasolini never made – Abel Ferrara (Welcome to New York, MIFF 2014; Bad Lieutenant) pays homage to a life of intellectual ferocity and creative passion unfairly cut short.
"Ferrara's film is a fractal mosaic evoking the multiverse of Pasolini's volcanic mind and life, his ‘sinful' sacrality and iconoclastic precognition." – Cinema Scope