Faithfully inspired by St. Matthew’s Gospel, the film portrays the beginning of Jesus Christ’s life: from the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary to the Nazarene’s birth and the slaughter of the innocents. As an adult, Jesus faces the temptations in the desert and travels around Palestine preaching the Gospel and making miracles, followed by the Apostles. Judas Iscariot’s betrayal and the trial before Pontius Pilate presage his Crucifixion and Resurrection. A stylistically different film from the recent The Passion by Mel Gibson, even if they were both shot mainly in the setting of the ancient “Sassi” of Matera, a town of caves dug in the rock. While Gibson dwells on the physical tortures inflicted to Christ, Pasolini lightly emphasizes the remarkable importance of the revolutionary beauty of the Evangelical Message and people’s faces, with some contemporary reference to the Third World. Friends, relatives and intellectuals take part in the cast, while the much-loved mother of the filmmaker acts as the Virgin Mary. The film is dedicated to the “dear, cheerful, familiar figure of John XXIII”, the pope of the Council deceased in 1963. Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna 1922 - Ostia, Rome, 1975) is one of the most important intellectual figures of the Italian twentieth century. Poet, writer, filmmaker, polemicist, he lives his childhood in his mother’s region, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where he loses a brother, killed by communist partisans during the war. Nevertheless, he becomes an “heretical” communist, both by virtue of his strong religious belief, expressed in many works (first of all in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo), and because he decides not to hide his homosexuality. He stands thirty-three trials: a “persecution” that ends up with his violent death at the hands of a young criminal, one of those “boys of life” to whom he dedicated a famous book. The key element of the many-sided Pasolinian vein is the aching nostalgia for peasant society, overcome by modernity and homogenisation. This is the origin of his empathy towards the rural world or the Roman lumpenproletariat. Among his films are: Accattone, La ricotta, which stages the crucifixion of a thief, Mamma Roma with Anna Magnani, Uccellacci e uccellini with Totò, Teorema and Il fiore delle mille e una notte. According to Pasolini, films, to which he also dedicated some very beautiful poems, are “the written language of reality”.