Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex (Edipo re, 1967) is Pier Paolo Pasolini's film adaptation of Sophocles — watch it online on iFILM. Shot mostly in Morocco's bare ochre landscapes rather than any studio recreation of ancient Greece, the film turns the myth into something raw and almost ritualistic, far removed from polished classical theater.

The structure is layered. A short modern prologue set in fascist Italy shows a young father staring at his infant son with barely disguised resentment. Then the story crashes back into antiquity: the abandoned baby grows up as Oedipus at the court of Corinth, flees an oracle that promises he will kill his father and bed his mother, and walks straight into both. Franco Citti plays Oedipus; Silvana Mangano is Jocasta. The cast moves through a landscape that feels older than civilization itself.

Pasolini called this his most personal work — a reckoning with his own father, displaced onto myth. It sits between The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Medea in his cycle of mythological films, and it carries the same blunt, tactile quality. Stream Oedipus Rex (1967) on iFILM.