Love Meetings

Love Meetings (Comizi d'amore, 1965) is an Italian documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Pier Paolo Pasolini takes a camera crew across Italy — from northern factories to southern villages — and simply asks people about sex, marriage, homosexuality, and divorce. In 1965 Italy, that was not a simple thing to do.

The answers come from everywhere: farm workers and university students, grandmothers and teenagers, bourgeois professionals and day labourers. Writer Alberto Moravia and psychologist Cesare Musatti provide running commentary. Children from poor neighbourhoods try to explain where babies come from. Old women weigh in on fidelity. The picture that forms is of a country caught between centuries — Catholic tradition on one side, rapid industrialization on the other.

Pasolini is no detached observer. He argues, he pushes back, and occasionally he reads his own poetry. What makes the film hold up after sixty years is the gap between what people say they believe and how they actually live — a gap that has not entirely closed. Stream Love Meetings (1965) online on iFILM.