ZAMEK Culture Centre

HOMMAGE: PASOLINI. Five masterpiecies of Pier Paolo Pasolini | 16-22.06.2025

The last part of the Trilogy of Life is a homage to the polysemous and often intoxicating Arabian Nights. Shot on landscapes and the cities of Yemen, Iran, Nepal, Eritrea and Ethiopia, the film combines the authentic locations with a meandering, “story-within-a-story” narrative structure. Similarly to guests wandering through the following chambers of an Arabian dream, the stories flow seamlessly from one to another. The actors, often non-professional, take on a range of roles – including the enslaved girl Zumurrud, the poor boy Nur-ad-Din, and the carefree, insensitive Aziz – inhabiting a world that is both cruel and demonic, yet also delightfully vibrant, filled with nudity and unrestrained sexuality. Pasolini avoids exoticization in favour of finding connections between the distant past and present: in landscapes, architecture, art and the human face. Positioned between a Eurocentric outlook and an ethnographic fascination with foreign cultures, Arabian Nights is a lyrical fantasy of youth, love and the joys that can accompany bodily pleasures. [Sebastian Smoliński]

Arabian Nights, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974, 130'

Language: Italian with Polish and English subtitles