Pasolini is an English-language internationally co-produced dramatic film directed by Abel Ferrara and written by Maurizio Braucci about the mysterious final days of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini (played by Willem Dafoe). It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival It was also screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Mamma Roma is Pasolini’s second feature and is among Pasolini’s most audaciously shaped and satisfying movies. The immortal Anna Magnani is equally vulnerable and volcanic as the titular character in Pasolini’s gritty tale of a mother determined to rise above poverty. The writer-director returns to the desolate outskirts of Rome for this tale of doomed maternal love set against a stark backdrop of ancient ruins and prefab apartment blocks. Former prostitute Mamma Roma is trying to start a fresh life in a new flat with her teenage son. But the criminal underworld she thought she had escaped slowly pulls her back into its vortex.

After writing a pair of novels, Ragazzi di Vita and Una Vita Violenta, set in the urban periphery of Rome, Pasolini decided to turn to cinema to continue exploring this world and its characters. Accattone is the nickname of Vittorio—played by non professional Franco Citti, a soon to be Pasolini regular—a young loafer roaming the hardscrabble Roman slum of Pigneto who fancies himself a pimp. The desperation of Vittorio’s sun-baked world is intensified by Tonino Delli Colli’s crisp cinematography and the strains of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. One of cinema’s great debuts, Accattone reimagines Neorealism by eschewing any sentimentality for the poetry of the everyday.

In Medea, Greek American soprano Maria Callas stars in a rare non-opera role as the title character in Pasolini’s haunting adaptation of the tragedy by Euripides, about a woman scorned by her husband (Jason of the Argonauts) who avenges herself with fierce abandon. The film is also ravishing in its visual imagery—Medea was shot on location in ancient sites of Italy, Turkey, and Syria, including the Citadel of Aleppo. British film critic Tony Rayns called this stunning portrait of a woman pushed to the brink, “a love song to Maria Callas.”

Rudy of C’era una Volta restaurant will re-create the Roman atmosphere for selected guests in the Castro Mezzanine.

Pasolini’s infamous final film transposes the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century treatise on torture to Mussolini’s Italy circa 1944. A group of representatives of the wealthy upper classes—a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate, and naturally, the President—have holed themselves up in a palatial estate in the titular city of Salò, where they have imprisoned a horde of young men and women to torment for their pleasure. Salò, a town in Northern Italy, was briefly made the capital under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government in 1943-1945. The story, rife with political implications, is in four segments, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. Pasolini’s controversial masterpiece makes disturbingly literal the way the rich exploit the poor. Salò descends into the abyss until not a fleck of light remains.