Synopsis
Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle Mille e una notte, 1974) is Pier Paolo Pasolini's fantasy film — watch it online on iFILM. It closes his Trilogy of Life: having moved through Boccaccio and Chaucer, Pasolini turned to Arabian folk tales and filmed a free-form adaptation on location in Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia, using real landscapes as a substitute for any fantasy set.
The film runs 131 minutes and nests several stories inside each other — slaves and sultans, demons and merchants, love affairs and betrayals — in the manner of the source material itself. Ninetto Davoli and Franco Merli carry the through-line while one tale keeps opening into another. No studio fakery: the exotic world is actual geography, photographed like a waking dream.
The film picked up the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1974. Among Pasolini's works it stands as the most sensuous and, by his standards, the most unguarded. Stream Arabian Nights (1974) online on iFILM.
Starring
Comments 0