Announced way back at the beginning of the year, this is a bit of news we missed, forgot about and are now reminded that not only is it actually a thing, but that it’s very much moving forward. Provocateur Abel Ferrara, who is currently finishing up “Welcome To New York,” a movie based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandal, is now preparing to bring the final moments in the life of one of cinema’s most daring directors to the big screen.
Ferrara is lining up “Pasolini” — yes, about Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — a movie that will see Willem Dafoe taking on the title role. Marking the fourth film between the actor and director (following “New Rose Hotel,” “Go Go Tales” and “4:44 Last Day On Earth“), the film will track Pasolini’s last days, presumably leading up to his murder. While a young hustler was arrested at the time, evidence later pointed to still unidentified extortionists as the possible culprits. But even in his brief career, Pasolini’s work pushed the edges of religious, political and sexual depiction on the big screen thanks to works like “Salo,” “The Gospel According To St. Matthew,” “The Canterbury Tales” and more.
Cineuropa reports that funding for Ferrara’s movie has been padded by Belgium’s Wallimage who join France’s Capricci Films and Italy’s Urania Pictures as producers on the movie. Production is reported to begin this year. Here’s the official synopsis:
Counting the last days of the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini, November 2, 1975. That day, Pasolini 53 years. In Rome, just back from Sweden, he started looking for her lover, a young prostitute with whom he agrees to a meeting with other “villains” for the next evening. Pasolini finds its cocoon and friends who warn that it must stop writing his inflammatory articles against the Christian Democrats, who have already had the skin of another journalist. But Pasolini wants to denounce “the puppet government”, what it costs.
