The Gospel According to St. Matthew

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) is an Italian-French drama by Pier Paolo Pasolini — watch it online on iFILM. The film follows the life of Jesus strictly from the Gospel of Matthew: Pasolini refused to add a single word of his own, using the biblical text as the complete script. The lead, Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui, was cast after a chance meeting and had never acted before.

Filmed in the sun-bleached landscapes of southern Italy, with local peasants filling most of the roles. Pasolini's own mother, Susanna, plays the older Mary. Tonino Delli Colli's restless handheld camera gives it the texture of a documentary rather than a pageant — sparse, unsentimental, shot as if the events were simply being recorded as they happened.

A committed Marxist making one of the most spiritually serious religious films ever — that contradiction is part of why it still pulls. The Vatican awarded it a special prize at Venice 1964. Pasolini himself felt the images never quite matched the poetry of the text, but audiences have been arguing the opposite for six decades. Stream The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) online on iFILM.