Film Details

Willem Dafoe returns to the Cinematheque! The Oscar-nominated actor will answer audience questions after a screening of a recent Abel Ferrara movie in which he plays the late, great Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), director of The Gospel According to Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, The Canterbury Tales, and others. (He was the subject of a near-complete Cinematheque retrospective in 2014.) Ferrara paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of this controversial artist—a Christian Marxist poet, intellectual, and homosexual—on the last day of his life. In fragments intercut with imagined scenes from what would have been his next film, we watch Pasolini as he works on a new novel, does a press interview, and figures out how to avoid censorship on Sálo: 120 Days of Sodom. Ferrara clearly sees the boundary-pushing filmmaker as a kindred spirit, and Dafoe, in dark-framed glasses, does him full justice. With Maria de Medeiros, Giada Colagrande, and Ninetto Davoli. Cleveland premiere. Some subtitles. DCP. 84 min.