Tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini
Film Festival
Medea (1969)
direction Pier Paolo Pasolini
in collaboration with Rocca Cinema
The parable of Maria, the Greek girl that bloomed into the divine Callas whose voice bewitched the world, left Pasolini no doubt: the protagonist of his Medea would be modelled after her. She became the heroine of an archaic, religious, underclass world—a world irreducibly opposed to the rational, secular and modern world of Jason, a role for which the triple jumper Giovanni Gentile was cast, who had twice broken the world record at the 1968 Olympics. Once again, the athlete and the singer will narrate of the clash between past and present—the former perishing while the latter retains no memory of its mythological childhood. After all, as Pasolini admitted, a director always makes the same film, exactly like a poet always writes the same poem.