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DIRECTED BY PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Italy | 1967 | English | 100 minutes | NA

Edipo Re is a highly personal screenplay adaption by Pasolini of the Greek drama by Sophocles. As his first colour feature, Edipo Re makes brilliant use of wildly alternating Moroccan landscapes, to transpose collective myth into a particular vision that is at once tender, sensual, and wholly unsparing.
The film is divided into three sections set in different eras. The opening takes place in 1920s Italy, and recounts a birth that echoes that of the director himself, the product of beautiful bourgeoisie’s affair with a military officer. The mid section depicts a time ‘outside of history”. It is here that the myth of Oedipus plays outplays out as revealed in a prophecy foretelling that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother Jocasta. When the citizens of Thebe discover what Oedipus and Jocasta have done, Oedipus blinds himself and Jocasta commits suicide. An epilogue shot on the streets of present-day Bologna finds Oedipus playing his flute for a bustling citizenry